FEMINIST REFUSAL TO SUCK-SEED – LES PIRES
And, finally, becoming an implicit "spokesperson" for a militant collective not only allows for recognition of the "milieu", but can also be a springboard for pursuing a paid career in associations.
We are concerned to take into account all oppressions by recognising the position of each one: we do not all have the same history, class, sexuality, origin or migratory/non-migratory experience.
In this process of appropriation of struggles, what began as a questioning of authority and domination is gradually declining and becomes trapped in power relations (salary, hierarchical division of labour, search for recognition by the institutional network, loss of autonomy, dependence on funding).
We are concerned to take into account all oppressions by recognising the position of each one: we do not all have the same history, class, sexuality, origin or migratory/non-migratory experience.
Refusing to pursue a career in an association, not seeking individual recognition, refusing to be the spokesperson or the sole speaker in public, even if you are "pushed" by others, and always signing texts collectively.
The more an association is recognized by the institutional network, the greater the symbolic power of the people who work there.
It also questions the way in which a certain feminist research has achieved scientific recognition, while presenting itself as critical in terms of content.
Richard Wright - The Outsider
Although it is Hattie’s own greed that gets her into the situation, Cross recognizes that she too is being exploited and exposes the two men who are trying to cheat her.
The sound that came from her now seemed to coincide with her recognition of danger.
Mr. Damon’s body was crushed and mangled beyond recognition or hope of direct identification.
If Jenny saw that photograph, would she not recognize him?
No; Jenny wouldn’t recognize him from that…
He had done a horrible thing; he had killed so swiftly and brutally that he hardly recognized what he had done as he recalled it to his mind.
He knew enough to make a numbing sense of recognition go through him.
In their being close to the common impulses of men, in their cynical acceptance of the cupidities of the human heart, in their frank recognition of outlandish passions they were akin to priests.
His eyes caught hers and he saw in them a glint of recognition.
They’ve so distorted these men that no one could ever recognize their psychological types…
“Mrs. Damon,” Houston began in a loud, clear voice, “do you recognize this man standing there?”
“I’m asking you: Do you recognize this man as your husband, Mrs. Damon?” Houston demanded.
Society would not even look at it, recognize it!
Paul Ricœur - The course for recognition
I put in first place the progression of the theme of identity, then, passing beyond it, that of otherness, and finally, in a more hidden background, that of the dialectic between recognition and misrecognition.
Nor do I say that the recognized identity of members of a community through those transactions placed under the heading of mutual recognition renders superfluous the features of the capable human being.
This transition is reinforced by the epistemic synonymy between attestation and recognition.
What is acquired with recognition-attestation is not lost, much less abolished with the passage to the stage of mutual recognition.
First of all, I will say that here it is still a question of identification. Being recognized, should it occur, would for everyone be to receive the full assurance of his or her identity, thanks to the recognition by others of each person's range of capacities.
As for the complement that I believe I had to add to the idea of a struggle for recognition, in the sense of mutual recognition through an exchange of gifts, it now gives me a chance to underscore the persistence even here of the idea of recognition-identification.
This is my first justification of the term course for this series of inquiries: the course of identity with its gaps and divergent meanings, its reprise of the logical sense of identification in its existential sense, and its recapitulation in being-recognized, thanks to the experiences of the struggle for recognition and that of states of peace.
The struggle for recognition, which for me precedes the recognition at work in the ceremonial exchange of gifts, places alterity/confrontation at the center of the picture.
In a word, the figures of alterity are innumerable on the plane of mutual recognition.
The last ones we considered in this text interweave conflict and shared generosity. Moving further back in our investigation, I would emphasize, and if need be note, the anticipations of mutuality in the part of this work devoted to self-recognition.
It was necessary to do this, in order subsequently to give mutual recognition its full meaning.
In this regard, the equation between attestation and recognition can only reinforce the selfassertive character of self-recognition.
And the final reconciliation around the funeral pyre is not far from being equivalent to some of the states of peace spoken of with reference to mutual recognition.
Can we think of a worse kind of alterity, joined to the recognition of responsibility for one's action, than the massacre of all the hero's rivals?
Yet here again the superimposed layers of interaction in saying, acting, and recounting must not obliterate the primary reference to the power to act for which self-recognition constitutes the attestation.
The relation between recognition in time and recognition before others turns out to be different in the case of promises.
In this, the promise links up with both recognition in time and recognition before others.
In these different ways self-recognition refers to others without this reference's assuming the position of a ground, like that of the power to act, nor does the "before others" imply reciprocity and mutuality.
The mutuality of recognition is anticipated in this "before others," but is not accomplished in it.
Should we then take one more step backward from self-recognition and seek the marks of intersubjectivity in the recognition-identification of something in general? Undoubtedly we should.
Taken as an act of language, the assertion invested in the act of judgment requires the commitment of the speaker just as much as do specific performative locutions, for which the promise remains a key example.
I have divided it into three distinct lines of inquiry, whose interweaving will contribute in turn to a kind of interconnectedness worthy of my title The Course of recognition.
I put in first place the progression of the theme of identity, then, passing beyond it, that of otherness, and finally, in a more hidden background, that of the dialectic between recognition and misrecognition.
Nor do I say that the recognized identity of members of a community through those transactions placed under the heading of mutual recognition renders superfluous the features of the capable human being.
This transition is reinforced by the epistemic synonymy between attestation and recognition.
What is acquired with recognition-attestation is not lost, much less abolished with the passage to the stage of mutual recognition.
First of all, I will say that here it is still a question of identification.
Being recognized, should it occur, would for everyone be to receive the full assurance of his or her identity, thanks to the recognition by others of each person's range of capacities.
As for the complement that I believe I had to add to the idea of a struggle for recognition, in the sense of mutual recognition through an exchange of gifts, it now gives me a chance to underscore the persistence even here of the idea of recognition-identification.
This is my first justification of the term course for this series of inquiries: the course of identity with its gaps and divergent meanings, its reprise of the logical sense of identification in its existential sense, and its recapitulation in being-recognized, thanks to the experiences of the struggle for recognition and that of states of peace.
I want now to add to this course of identity and alterity another, less obvious one having to do with the relations between recognition and misrecognition over the course of these reflections.
In fact, the shadow of misrecognition continues to darken the light that may come from the work of clarification, of "existential elucidation" (to use the title of the second volume of Karl Jasper's Philosophy) that is at issue throughout this book.
In the phase of recognition-identification, the mind's claim to master the sense of something in general found an appropriate expression in the verb to recognize used in the active voice.
It was in the third chapter that the dialectic between recognition and misrecognition first acquired its greatest visibility before taking on its forms of greatest dissimulation.
The investigation of mutual recognition can be summed up as astruggle against the misrecognition of others at the same time that it is a struggle for recognition of oneself by others.
Hobbes's challenge, to which the theory of Anerkennung is meant to reply, is based on a fictitious description of the state of nature where distrust occupies the middle ground in the enumeration of the passions that lead to the war of all against all. However, we left room for the recognition at work in the expectation that each of the partners, in those contracts preceding the great contract of each with Leviathan, will at the proper time yield power along with everyone else.
Yet it is at the very heart of Anerkennung that the competition between recognition and misrecognition is revealed, both as regardsself-recognition and as regards recognition of others.
We have not forgotten the sequence on crime, the expression par excellence of the famous "work of the negative." The criminal makes himself recognized in his rebellious singularity vis-a-vis the law that refuses to recognize [meconnait] him. In this way, misrecognition finds itself incorporated into the dynamic of recognition.
This dialectic deploys its full resources in recent applications of the Hegelian theory.
It is not surprising that it is negative feelings that motivate the conflicts that are at work in the successive models of recognition, on the level of emotions, then on the juridical and social levels.
The threat of making errors, mistakes are something to avoid, and first of all to discover and condemn. It is only after the fact that mistakes show themselves to be a relevant part of the search for the truth. With contempt, the incorporation of the negative into the winning of recognition is complete.
We may even dare to speak here of the work of misrecognition in the gaining of recognition.
It is this involvement of misrecognition in recognition that leads to the expression "struggle for recognition"—where conflict is the soul of this process.
This inherence of misrecognition in recognition in the form of contempt sets us on the path toward a form of misrecognition that our last reflections devoted to the gift and the exchange of gifts give us a way of detecting.
Recall that the transition from the theme of struggle to that of the gift was linked to a question having to do with the always incomplete nature of the struggle for recognition.
It is precisely the promises contained in such states of peace that pose the problem of a concealed form of misrecognition that could not be uncovered until the idea of mutuality had been brought to term.
It was then that the idea arose of a mutual recognition backed by the gift as something given. And we risked the complementary idea that this recognition did not recognize itself, to such a degree was it invested in the exchange of gifts that substitute for it even while securing it.
Following Derrida, the question then arises whether there may not be, associated with this one, a more subtle form of misrecognition that misrecognizes itself.
What kind of misrecognition?
Misrecognized or recognized, the other remains unknown in terms of an originary apprehension of the mineness of selfhood.
This misrecognition is not that of misrecognizing someone, but rather that of misrecognizing the asymmetry in the relation between me and the other.
Here the discussion comes up again that I deliberately placed at the head of the second chapter, as a kind of anticipatory text held in reserve for the discussion of this final phase of the dialectic between recognition and misrecognition.
The laborious character of this phenomenology of others, which counts against it, authorizes us at the end of our own undertaking to consider once again its meaning and to discern in it a powerful reminder, when praise of mutual recognition leads us to forget the originary asymmetry in the relation between the self and others, which even the experience of peaceful states does not manage to abolish.
Forgetting this asymmetry, thanks to the success of analyses of mutual recognition, would constitute the ultimate misrecognition at the very heart of actual experiences of recognition.
Now it is just the opposite: How to integrate into mutuality the dissymmetry, in response to the suspicion that this dissymmetry is capable of undermining from within any confidence in the power of reconciliation attaching to the process of recognition?
My thesis here is that the discovery of this forgetfulness about dissymmetry is beneficial to recognition in its mutual form.
Finally, gratitude, the last form of recognition considered in this work, receives from the dialectic between dissymmetry and mutuality a surplus of meaning.
Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you.
I had discovered unrecognized compulsions of my being -- even though I could not answer "yes" to their promptings.
Since you never recognize me even when in closest contact with me, and since, no doubt, you'll hardly believe that I exist, it won't matter if you know that I tapped a power line leading into the building and ran it into my hole in the ground.
Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement. Take the man whom I almost killed: Who was responsible for that near murder -- I? I don't think so, and I refuse it.
Shouldn't he, for his own personal safety, have recognized my hysteria, my "danger potential"?
Would they recognize my ability?
Students looked up and smiled in recognition as we rolled slowly past.
I could recognize the Founder and Dr. Bledsoe among them, the figures in the photographs had never seemed actually to have been alive, but were more like signs or symbols one found on the last pages of the dictionary...
I recognized the place as soon as I saw the group of children in stiff new overalls who played near a rickety fence.
They were crouching behind their eyes waiting for him to speak -- just as I recognized that I was trembling behind my own.
At first I failed to recognize them.
As I drew nearer I recognized the loose gray shirts and pants worn by the veterans.
Then coming to mine, the moist eyes focused with recognition.
I hardly recognized him without his hard-starched white uniform.
But now they seemed not to recognize him and began shouting curses.
You would be canceled, perforated, voided, become the recognized magnet attracting loose screws.
I see. And would you recognize it if you saw it?"
"You will hardly recognize it, but it is very fitting that you came to the Golden Day with the young fellow," he said.
We must accept -- even when those were absent, and the men who made the railroads and ships and towers of stone, were before our eyes, in the flesh, their voices different, unweighted with recognizable danger and their delight in our songs more sincere seeming, their regard for our welfare marked by an almost benign and impersonal indifference
Hey, Miss Susie! the sound of words that were no words, counterfeit notes singing achievements yet unachieved, riding upon the wings of my voice out to you, old matron, who knew the voice sounds of the Founder and knew the accents and echo of his promise; your gray old head cocked with the young around you, your eyes closed, face ecstatic, as I toss the word sounds in my breath, my bellows, my fountain, like bright-colored balls in a water spout -- hear me, old matron, justify now this sound with your dear old nod of affirmation, your closed-eye smile and bow of recognition, who'll never be fooled with the mere content of words, not my words, not these pinfeathered flighters that stroke your lids till they flutter with ecstasy with but the mere echoed noise of the promise.
It was the vet, who gave me a smile of recognition; an attendant sat beside him.
Now I recognized a selfconsciousness about them, as though they, we, were ashamed to witness the eviction, as though we were all unwilling intruders upon some shameful event; and thus we were careful not to touch or stare too hard at the effects that lined the curb; for we were witnesses of what we did not wish to see, though curious, fascinated, despite our shame, and through it all the old female, mind-plunging crying.
And with this sense of dispossession came a pang of vague recognition: this junk, these shabby chairs, these heavy, old-fashioned pressing irons, zinc wash tubs with dented bottoms -- all throbbed within me with more meaning than there should have been: And why did I, standing in the crowd, see like a vision my mother hanging wash on a cold windy day, so cold that the warm clothes froze even before the vapor thinned and hung stiff on the line, and her hands white and raw in the skirt-swirling wind and her gray head bare to the darkened sky -- why were they causing me discomfort so far beyond their intrinsic meaning as objects? And why did I see them now as behind a veil that threatened to lift, stirred by the cold wind in the narrow street?
You might not recognize it just now, but that part of you is dead!
Little worries whirled up within me: That I might forget my new name; that I might be recoginzed from the audience.
I'd have to pass her by unrecognized.
What if they recognized me?
And I seemed to move in close, like the lens of a camera, focusing into the scene and feeling the heat and excitement and the pounding of voice and applause against my diaphragm, my eyes flying from face to face, swiftly, fleetingly, searching for someone I could recognize, for someone from the old life, and seeing the faces become vaguer and vaguer the farther they receded from the platform.
Even my technique had been different; no one who had known me at college would have recognized the speech.
They had wanted me to succeed, and fortunately I had spoken for them and they had recognized my words.
With great care he went about instructing me how to deal with hecklers, on what to do if we were attacked, and upon how to recognize our own members from the rest of the crowd.
Recognize you'self inside and you wan the kings among men!
Ras recognized your black possibilities, mahn.
So why don't you recognize your black duty, mahn, and come jine us?"
Ras recognizes the true issues and he is not afraid to be black.
We recognized no loose ends, everything could be controlled by our science.
He was leaning upon the desk now, looking at the page but with no recognition in his eyes.
Why hadn't he said something, recognized me, cursed me? Attacked me?
He was a slender brown fellow whom I recognized immediately as a close friend of Clifton's, and who now was looking intently across the tops of cars to where down the block near the post office on the other side a tall policeman was approaching. Perhaps he'll know something, I thought, as he looked around to see me and stopped in confusion.
At first I thought it was a cop and a shoeshine boy; then there was a break in the traffic and across the sun-glaring bands of trolley rails I recognized Clifton.
I trembled with excitement; they hadn't recognized me.
It was as though by dressing and walking in a certain way I had enlisted in a fraternity in which I was recognized at a glance -- not by features, but by clothes, by uniform, by gait.
For there had been recognition of a kind in his voice but not for me.
"I've been waiting for you to recognize me, daddy," a voice said.
All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.
I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same -- except I now **recognized** my invisibility.
Could they recognize choice in that which wasn't seen . . . ?
And wasn't that old slave a scientist -- or at least called one, recognized as one -- even when he stood with hat in hand, bowing and scraping in senile and obscene servility?
I could see the role which I was to play as plainly as I saw Jack's red hair. Incidents of my past, both recognized and ignored, sprang together in my mind in an ironic leap of consciousness that was like looking around a corner.
It was a frantic, unrecognizable voice from the district.
I faced them knowing that the madman in a foreign costume was real and yet unreal, knowing that he wanted my life, that he held me responsible for all the nights and days and all the suffering and for all that which I was incapable of controlling, and I no hero, but short and dark with only a certain eloquence and a bottomless capacity for being a fool to mark me from the rest; saw them, recognized them at last as those whom I had failed and of whom I was now, just now, a leader, though leading them, running ahead of them, only in the stripping away of my illusionment.
I looked at Ras on his horse and at their handful of guns and recognized the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine.
But somehow the floor had now turned to sand and the darkness to light, and I lay the prisoner of a group consisting of Jack and old Emerson and Bledsoe and Norton and Ras and the school superintendent and a number of others whom I failed to recognize, but all of whom had run me, who now pressed around me as I lay beside a river of black water, near where an armored bridge arched sharply away to where I could not see.
America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain.
But then he was only a few feet away and I recognized him; it was Mr. Norton.
Richard Wright - Uncle Tom's Children
But the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target.