A context of protracted postcolonial misrecognition and social injustice brought most of the contributors to this special issue together. This context raises an acute awareness of the ideological limitations not only of the dominant normative frameworks of recognition, developed by social and political theorists such as Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, and Charles Taylor, but of the African philosophical conceptions of recognition represented by ubuntu. What is the ethical or normative status of the insights into social ontology that we find in (...) theories of recognition? The authors acknowledge the entanglement of norms of recognition in contested relations of power that influence the formation of subjects and the normative ambivalence of recognition which enables and constrains subjective agency. Ongoing inequality and social injustice makes palpable the practical effects of norms of mis/recognition. The authors reinterpret the concept of recognition to allow for normative ambivalence and ideological sensitivity in the current postcolonial setting. (shrink)

As biological taxonomists have only recently begun to acknowledge, humanity is stuck in a tension between its myriad social, cultural, political and religious cosmologies – its various umwelten – and the desire for rational, scientific classification. What does it mean that the rational logics of classifications that we so readily employ to recognise the reality before our eyes cannot account for the passionate attachments that exceed any categorical identifications and actually make us who we are, because these are the lives (...) we live beyond our ability to define them? What our focus upon the politics of recognition often misses is that intimate connections between persons – what we might call a more authentic form of recognition, a true seeing of the other – often goes beyond recognition, beyond any classifications that society foists upon us. I explore this question directly, pointing to possibilities for better recognition of this tension and how such recognition can reform society. (shrink)

While the Euromodern model of the nation-state has been the subject of unremitting, exhaustive and merited political criticism, this article advances an anti-anti-statism. Oriented by warnings of theorists who have advanced plurinational states, creolising the nation, separating states from nations and abolishing the state, I turn to Fanon's insistence that states be re-envisioned beyond Cold War alternatives and narrowing nationalisms; Cabral's modelling of political unity on an effective football team; and Gyekye's suggestion of deliberately forging meta-national states. I argue that (...) we need the institutional rejection of states reliant on racialised enslavement and colonialism as the exclusive custodians of bestowing and withholding political recognition. We must also premise rightful belonging not only on historical group identities but on how these are expressed in records of political activities demonstrating commitment to the cultivation and extension of national consciousness or the meta-state as the basis of political legitimacy. (shrink)

This article discusses Charles Taylor's analysis of the ‘politics of recognition’, which reveals that the major versions of the latter share an ideological conception of Eros as a binding, unifying force. Such striving for oneness is seen as key to forming harmonious, just communities and nations, and ultimately global cohesion. I refer to this as the ‘ideology of Eros’. However, Taylor highlights an ironically divisive opposition concerning how to realise such oneness, based on incompatible foundational principles: ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’. Instead (...) of a choice, Taylor opts for the demanding political task of ongoing negotiation between them. I augment Taylor's analysis by re-evaluating the figure of ‘non-recognition’ arising from Lacan's critique of the ‘ideology of Eros’, which is centred on Socrates’ encounter with Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium and to which he adds his notion of genuine love, which affirms an ethic of healthy ‘non-recognition’. I argue that this ethic supports the difficult political task that Taylor rightly calls for. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the potential of reciprocal relations of recognition of epistemic agency to respond to calls to transform pedagogical practice in the South African academy and, in particular, to disrupt ongoing epistemic injustice in the academy. First, I put forward a picture of recognition as a practice underpinned by an attitude of playful self-discipline and spend some time elucidating what this attitude involves. Second, I turn to a description of epistemic agents as socially and historically situated knowers (...) with normative status. Third, I bring these discussions together to speak about the practice of recognising our own and one another's epistemic agency. And, finally, I explore how intentionally engaging in this practice might serve to respond to calls to transform pedagogical practice and address epistemic injustice in the academy. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the marginalisation of women, specifically in African philosophy, with the aim of cautioning and inspiring a reconfiguration of African philosophy that takes seriously the discourse of gender as it does the discourse of race. I employ Charles Taylor's notion of recognition to understand some of the effects of a lack of recognition, which I then extend to the lack of recognition of women in African philosophy. I present this understanding against the background of the ongoing (...) debates and efforts of decolonisation by illustrating how the marginalisation of women in African philosophy places the discipline at odds with decolonisation and its emancipatory objective. African philosophy, in the process of legitimising its existence, has adopted a male-centred framework which has not only undermined the existence of women but also failed to recognise their contributions. This has influenced the practice and discourse of African philosophy, resulting in the underrepresentation of women therein. (shrink)

Axel Honneth's earlier conception of recognition as an ethical ideal has received significant critique from feminist Foucauldian critical theorists, such as Judith Butler, Lois McNay and Amy Allen, for undermining how recognition can often be a conduit for subordination. As a result, there has been an increasing ambivalence about the nature of recognition in the critical theory literature. Seeing that the ambivalence critiques may engender scepticism around the utility of recognition in critical theory, this article seeks to counteract this scepticism. (...) However, rescuing recognition from a terminal scepticism requires that we move away from Honneth's insistence on a normative reading of recognition to a strictly functionalist conception of recognition. This functionalist account of recognition, derived through an exegetical revisiting of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, takes recognition as a tool for or a means of attaining actuality that can be appropriated in various and often conflicting ways. (shrink)

Animal pain and suffering is mostly caused by humans, particularly by the human use of domestic animals. This calls for the recognition of animal pain and suffering. My focus is on pain-related suffering. I argue for recognition in the phenomenological sense of giving adequate regard to pain experience in animals and their capacity to express it in their own species-specific terms, in a way that will motivate us to prevent it. My advocacy for the recognition of pain in animals consequently (...) includes a consideration of moral and political action to avert their suffering. (shrink)

Frantz Fanon's revolutionary psychiatry aimed to help constitute a postcolonial Algeria that recognised the humanity of all its members and, more widely, a Third World liberated of the shackles of colonial misrecognition. Fanon offers us an account of how a politics of misrecognition can give way to a politics of recognition. However, the violent means by which he thought a society guided by the ideal of mutual recognition could be achieved from the remnants of a colonial order cannibalised his democratic (...) aims. I contrast Fanon's views with Hanna Arendt's on the role of violence and her republicanism. I argue that her views are more promising than Fanon's because they foster mutual recognition if adequately embodied in the political sphere. However, tragically, colonial Algeria did not present the conditions for a new democratic order to thrive, mainly due to France's protracted and uncompromising brutality. (shrink)

This article is heavily inspired by Michel Foucault's lectures on biopolitical power over life as a starting point for thinking about contemporary global response to COVID-19. The article examines how the government of Ghana deployed biopolitical interventions in response to the pandemic. COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the biopolitics of the current moment, demonstrating the levels of intrusiveness that state power structures have on biological life of the population. The article theorises that the government of Ghana's response to the pandemic indicates (...) that the biopolitical critique of the extension of regulatory governance of life has become blurred in our contemporary times. In conclusion, the article investigates the biopolitics of the pandemic governance from the perspective of conceptualising a ‘beyond’ of such biopolitics, arguing that a critique of existing biopolitics needs to account for its embeddedness in the affirmative modes of biopolitics. (shrink)

This article examines two mechanisms in treating Persian names in English-speaking contexts: name projection and name adoption. The article adopts Edward Said's Orientalism, noting Western-centric naming and colonial division with Western superiority. The treatment of the Oriental name will be discussed within the frame of linguistic Orientalism which refers to the portrayal or study of Eastern languages and cultures through the lens of Western superiority or exoticisation. Previously, this mindset projected the coloniser's preferred names onto the territory and individuals of (...) the Other. Today, the name of the Other is governed as the subjects from different backgrounds are propelled to conform to the coloniser's preferences in choosing Anglo-sounding names. I will conclude that the shift from the authoritative name projection to the disciplinary name adoption manifests a Foucauldian trajectory from ‘sovereign power’ to modern ‘disciplinary power’ in taming the name of the Other. (shrink)

Cornelius Castoriadis’ The Imaginary Institution of Society and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy are two cornerstones of contemporary political philosophy. Insufficient consideration has been given to the fact that both works show important theoretical coincidences in terms of structure and content. The first part of this article explores the possibility of reading Castoriadis’ work in post-foundational terms, following Oliver Marchart's approach. In addition, the respective political ontologies of Castoriadis and Laclau and Mouffe are presented as ‘ontologies (...) of signification’ in which the imaginary/discursive component is central. Finally, the contributions of the three authors to the emancipatory project through the notions of ‘autonomy’ (Castoriadis) and ‘radical democracy’ (Laclau and Mouffe) are considered, highlighting both their common features and their divergences. The latter had to do mainly with their antagonistic conceptions of political representation and its relation to democracy. (shrink)

This article critically engages with central tenets of decolonial thought. While sympathetic to decolonial thought's anti-colonialism and critique of Eurocentric universalism, the article argues that decolonial thought's understanding(s) of knowledge relies on an essentialising centralisation of origins and roots. Against decolonial thought's assertion that a knowledge's relevance for anti-colonial struggle results from its position of exteriority vis-á-vis colonial systems of domination, the article suggests that we need to look at the dialectical and hybrid processes through which bodies of knowledge are (...) made agentic in relation to concrete contexts of political conflict. To discern a body of knowledge's meaning and relevance for anti-colonial struggles, we need to understand that it is continually shaped and reshaped from recurrent practices of reading, dissemination and re-articulation, through which the theory or knowledge body becomes hybridised and reformulated in relation to incessantly evolving contexts. (shrink)

Forms of African relational ethics that prioritise the value of harmony struggle to accommodate arguably valuable disharmony, such as disruptive emotions like anger. A wider literature on political emotions has defended the value of such emotions and even proposed that a particular form of injustice, affective injustice, can arise if we fail to create space for them. While it has recently been proposed that Thaddeus Metz's African-inspired relational moral theory can accommodate disruptive emotions and address affective injustice, in this philosophical (...) article I argue that any success that Metz's account has in this regard is superficial. This critique has important implications: either we need to engage further with disruptive emotions and affective injustice within an African relational ethics, or it may be the case that we instead need to return to how we conceptualise affective injustice to ensure that it does the justice-promoting work that we want it to do. (shrink)

The article explores the role that can be played by philosophy education in terms of addressing the crisis of subjectivity and modernity in Africa. Philosophy education in Africa can play the function of liberating Africans from alien modalities of existence and ways of being, and in return embarking on a new journey of self-invention. Without succumbing to a reactive epistemic nationalism that identifies the totality of European philosophy with the ideologies of colonialism, there is a need to develop a form (...) of philosophy education that is cognisant of the troubled path within which the African mode of individual existence and modernity are constituted within. This contributes to the development of a vision of an African future that is founded on collective histories and struggles. (shrink)

In The New Religious Intolerance, Martha Nussbaum addresses rising intolerance and fear of difference in contemporary societies. She suggests overcoming these issues through ethical consistency, equality, and the cultivation of sympathetic imagination. Nussbaum views this imaginative engagement as a form of civic friendship essential for societal transformation. However, we argue that her concept of civic friendship is problematic. First, Nussbaum's criteria do not suffice to define friendship. Second, this thin concept of civic friendship is unlikely to achieve the societal transformation (...) Nussbaum envisions. We propose developing a more substantive account of civic friendship. This paper aims to create an Aristotelian account of civic friendship within a capabilitarian framework compatible with contemporary, plural societies. (shrink)

This article argues that Alain Badiou's theory of the subject offers conceptual resources that help make sense of ordinary life-experiences of ‘evental moments’ and enable the critique of hypertrophic forms of political or corporate agency. The article identifies a set of ideas through which Badiou's philosophy contributes to much-needed emancipatory thinking today. As it investigates the notions of horlieu and the event, the article stresses that true political change requires the emancipation of the ‘quasi-totality’, something that ‘reactive’ political or corporate (...) subjects would not be able to deliver. The piece emphasises that, for Badiou, universalist equality is the indispensable game-changer of politics, and that every single person can contribute to genuinely egalitarian projects. In Badiou's view, there are no meta-subjects and meta-events. Everyone can experience truth in their lives. (shrink)

Shortly after the financial crisis of 2008, Wolfgang Streeck emerged as a highly influential and ambitious critical theorist of capitalism and crisis. Streeck's crisis theory of capitalism is built around an account of neoliberal policy reform as a family of responses to economic upheavals that first emerged during the 1970s. Based on an analysis of four major shocks all occurring in that decade, I argue that Streeck's crisis theory is excessively economistic in its understanding of the crisis tendencies that first (...) propelled neoliberal reform and insufficiently attentive to the global context of their emergence. Theorising the significance of this pivotal historical moment requires more attention to the conflictual entanglements between societies of the Global South and North in the context of decolonisation, war and revolution, and a more nuanced appreciation of the political context of economic reform. (shrink)

The coronavirus pandemic made the biopolitics of infection control the core object of states around the world. Globally, states governed spheres usually free of state control, implementing various restrictions, closing down society in the process. This is possible due to the state's capacities to act through and over society, grounded in the state's powers. I argue that while the pandemic has led to useful and interesting state-centric Foucauldian literature on the politics of COVID-19, this literature has not fully taken the (...) theoretical lessons of the pandemic into account. Explicating these lessons, I discuss how the pandemic invites us to reconsider the Foucauldian approach to the state. The purpose of this article is to combine the Foucauldian theory of power with a Weberian state theory based on Michael Mann's work on the state and the sources of power, so to lay the foundations for a Weberian-Foucauldian theory of the state. (shrink)

This article focuses on efforts by indigenous activists to oppose a mega-development in the middle of the Two Rivers Urban Park (TRUP) at the River Club site in Observatory, Cape Town. In the article we argue that, even though the mega-development ultimately went ahead, intense contestation surrounding Khoi cultural heritage contributed towards opening up the ‘black box’ of urban development in Cape Town, as well as pressuring the developers to accommodate some of the demands of indigenous activists and environmentalists. We (...) also examine why and on what terms it was even possible for a small group of indigenous activists to temporarily halt a mega-development driven by powerful actors, including Amazon, the City of Cape Town and private developers. Drawing inspiration from Bruno Latour's notion of the black box, we show how these anti-development activists were able to interrupt the construction process and create the conditions for opening up to public and legal scrutiny opaque urban development processes. (shrink)

This article proposes a retheorisation of Rawlsian civil disobedience through examining the burdens we expect people to bear when they practice civil disobedience, focussing specifically on marginalised groups. First, I consider public concerns over civil disobedience, to elicit the idea of an ‘authentic civil disobedience’. I then assess the claim that civil disobedience occurs within a ‘nearly just’ society in order to recognise the more complex position of marginalised civil disobedients. This allows me to frame any criteria we theorise for (...) civil disobedience as a wicked problem. Next, I examine one particular criterion dominant within the literature: that to be interpreted as civil disobedience, disobedients must show a willingness to suffer the legal consequences – and so, must not act anonymously. I claim that this asks too much of civil disobedients in a marginalised context and conclude civil disobedience theory needs retheorising to consider when and why anonymity is acceptable. (shrink)

In Apartheid South Africa, eugenic notions formed an underlying justification for the superiority of the white race over Africans, through the works of international eugenicists like Galton and Pearson, and locally through prominent South African eugenicist H. B. Fantham. These ideas are expressed and elaborated upon in Emevwo Biakalo's essay ‘Categories of Cross-Cultural Cognition and the African Condition’. His work serves particularly to highlight that the mind and cognitive processes of Africans were considered very different from their white counterparts, and (...) thus they would require different approaches to education. I demonstrate here how these views served as part of the underlying justification for Apartheid in South Africa, particularly in Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd's insistence on creating separate and distinct educational systems for different races. This eugenic legacy is still visible in South Africa's radically unequal education system to this day. (shrink)