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Lois McNay
Polity Press , Cambridge, 2008 , 232pp ., £16.99 ,
ISBN: 978-0745629325
Lois McNay's thoughtful and thought-provoking new book Against Recognition deserves to be widely read. Demonstrating an extensive knowledge and perspicacious understanding of contemporary accounts of the psychology and politics of recognition, McNay deploys a modified version of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus, both to point out what she regards as the failings of such accounts and also to suggest a way beyond them.
It must be emphasized straightaway that McNay is not entirely against recognition. She sees value both in its conception of dialogical, situated and practical subjectivity, and in its emphasis on the importance of identity claims in contemporary politics (p. 1). However, McNay objects to a number of general tendencies in contemporary accounts of recognition, focusing in particular on Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib and Jessica Benjamin. She argues that all of these accounts are based too closely on a Hegelian depiction of the struggle for recognition. In this struggle, at the same time as self and other seek domination over each other, the latent possibility of a reciprocal relationship between the two is also suggested. For McNay, this Hegelian motif leads to a series of interconnected problems. First, it results in an...