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The productive force of the negative and the desire for recognition: Lessons from Hegel and Lacan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Charlotte Epstein
Charlotte Epstein*
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney
*
*Corresponding author. Email: Charlotte.epstein@sydney.edu.au
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Abstract

In this article I theorise the concept of misrecognition that we aim to bring to the study of international politics with this Special Issue. I draw upon three sources to do so: recognition theory, Hegel, and Jacques Lacan. I show that, while the seeds of an interest in misrecognition were laid in that interdisciplinary Hegelian scholarship known as recognition theory, it remains underdeveloped. To develop it into a concept I chart a path through recognition theory back to Hegel’s original dialectic of the master and servant in the Phenomenology of Spirit. What the dialectic captures, I argue, are the actual dynamics of misrecognition in social life, not an idealised form of recognition. This foundational, constitutive misrecognition is what Lacan also theorises by way of his concept of ‘fantasy’. Both Hegel and Lacan foreground a misrecognised, desiring subject that challenges the ways in which agency has been understood in international politics. Lastly, I show the purchase of a Hegelian-Lacanian analysis for IR by considering the relations between sovereignty and nuclear weapons under the lens of fantasy.

Keywords

ConstitutivityRecognitionDesireFantasyAgencyIdentityPsychoanalysisHegelLacanŽižek
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 44 , Special Issue 5: Special Issue on Misrecognition in World Politics: Revisiting Hegel , December 2018 , pp. 805 - 828
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2018 

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References

1 Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’être et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943)Google Scholar .

2 Charlotte Epstein, Thomas Lindemann, and Ole Jacob Sending, ‘Frustrated sovereigns: the agency that makes the world go around’, Review of International Studies, 44:5 (2018), introduction to the Special Issue.

3 Importantly, a structure is not an essence: structures can be unstable and motile, and such structures are at the heart of poststructuralist thought, as I have shown elsewhere. See Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations: Why returning to language is vital to prolonging the owl’s flight’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:3 (2013), pp. 499–519; Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Theorizing agency in Hobbes’s wake: the rational actor, the self or the speaking subject?’, International Organization, 67:2 (2013), pp. 287–361 CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Hence to seek to uncover the structures that account for human action is not to seek to fix them to a human essence – it is not an essentialising move.

4 This foregrounding of the place of desire in international politics builds on my earlier work; see notably Epstein, ‘Theorizing agency in Hobbes’s wake’, and Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 17:2 (2011), pp. 327–350 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

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7 This is a non-essentialist substrate, because, as we will see, it is constantly in (re)construction.

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28 Pippin, ‘Reconstructivism’, p. 13.

29 Ibid.

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34 Ibid., p. 21.

35 Ibid., p. 62.

36 Ibid., p. 12.

37 Ibid., p. 13.

38 Ibid., p. 12.

39 Ibid., p. 22.

40 Ibid., p. 60, emphasis in original.

41 Ibid., p. 22.

42 Ibid., p. 15.

43 Ibid., pp. 10–11, emphasis in original.

44 Ibid., p. 22.

45 Ibid., p. 11.

46 See Epstein, Lindemann, and Sending, ‘Frustrated sovereigns’.

47 Markell, Bound by Recognition, p. 14.

48 Oliver, Witnessing. See also McNay, Against Recognition.

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65 Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)Google Scholar ; Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (London: Zone Books, 1988)Google Scholar ; Bataille, Georges, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986)Google Scholar ; Green, André, Le travail du négatif (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 2011)Google Scholar , my translation.

66 See Green, Le travail du négatif.

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69 Comay, ‘Resistance and repetition’.

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71 Ibid., p. 14.

72 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 117 [197].

73 Pippin, Robert B., ‘On Hegel’s claim that self-consciousness is “desire itself” (“Begierde Überhaupt”)’, in Arto Laitinen and Heikki Ikaheimo (eds), Recognition and Social Ontology (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 57, 66 Google Scholar . Hegel’s Geist (reason) is more than simply the Kantian capacity for abstraction. It is our ability to make sense, of the world and of ourselves, that is steeped in experience. Pippin in ‘Reconstructivism’ calls it the faculty of ‘account-giving’. ‘A diamond net into which we bring everything to make it intelligible’ is the striking metaphor Hegel coins to capture it (quoted in Pippin, ‘Reconstructivisim’, p. 9). Reason is the object of the subsequent parts of the Phenomenology, which lie beyond my focus. My discussion centres mostly on its fourth part.

74 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 117 [197].

75 Ibid., p. 102 [166].

76 See Epstein, ‘Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations’.

77 Pippin, ‘On Hegel’s claim that self-consciousness is “desire itself”’, pp. 57–8.

78 Ibid., p. 59.

79 Cited in ibid., p. 79.

80 The French Hegelian Bernard Bourgeois, my teacher, has rendered the work of the prefix by translating Gegenstand (object) as ob-ject. See La Phénoménologie de l’esprit, trans. Bernard Bourgois (Paris: Vrin, 2006).

81 Pippin, ‘On Hegel’s claim that self-consciousness is “desire itself”’, pp. 59–60.

82 Ibid., p. 60.

83 Ibid., p. 64.

84 Ibid., p. 64, p. 62.

85 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 107 [174].

86 Ibid., p. 107 [175].

87 Ibid., p. 103 [167].

88 Pippin, ‘On Hegel’s claim that self-consciousness is “desire itself”, p. 58.

89 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 107 [175].

90 Ibid., p. 108 [178], translation modified.

91 Ibid., p. 108 [177].

92 Kojève, Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel.

93 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power.

94 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.

95 Pippin, Robert B., Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

96 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 112–13 [189].

97 Ibid., p. 111 [187].

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid., p. 113 [190].

100 Ibid., p. 103 [167].

101 Pippin, ‘On Hegel’s claim that self-consciousness is “desire itself”.

102 Sending, Ole Jacob, ‘Constitution, choice and change: Problems with the “logic of appropriateness” and its use in constructivist theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 8:4 (2002), pp. 443–470 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

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104 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 8.

105 See also, for example, Glynos, ‘The grip of ideology’; Glynos and Stavakakis, ‘Lacan and political subjectivity’; Arfi, ‘Fantasy in the discourse of social theory of international politics’; Epstein, ‘Theorizing agency in Hobbes’s wake’ and ‘Who speaks?’.

106 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 7.

107 This script of statehood was also reproduced by the so-called Islamic state.

108 Jabri, Vivienne, The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity (London: Routledge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

109 Julia Gallagher, ‘Misrecognition in the making of a state: Ghana’s international relations under Kwame Nkrumah’, Review of International Studies, 44:5 (2018), this Special Issue.

110 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 7.

111 Lacan develops his graph of desire at various different stages of his work, but the most useful for my purposes is the one he puts forward in 1960 in ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious’, not least because it was written as a lecture addressed to an audience of philosophers well-versed in Hegel. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies also provides a good entry point into the Lacanian concept of fantasy.

112 Green, Le travail du négatif.

113 Lacan, Jacques, ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 240 Google Scholar .

114 This is why the concept of socialisation is so problematic in a Lacanian perspective; see Van Haute, Against Adaptation. For my critique in IR, see Epstein, ‘Stop telling us how to behave’.

115 Lacan, ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire’, p. 240. Lacan distinguishes this repressed ‘I’ from the ‘Ego’, which contains the fundamental truth about the subject (in the form of this fantasy), from the ‘Ego’, which is the illusionary construction that served to project the unity of an actually very divided self.

116 Alan Sheridan, ‘Translator’s Note’, in Écrits, p. xi.

117 Lacan, Jacques, ‘Kant Avec Sade’, in Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 765–792 Google Scholar .

118 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. xvi.

119 Lacan, ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire’, p. 238.

120 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. xiv.

121 Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 9.

122 Ibid., p. 7.

123 Ibid., p. 53.

124 For a consonant, precursory analysis of sovereignty as a generative grammar, see Wæver, Ole, ‘Identity, integration and security: Solving the sovereignty puzzle in EU studies’, Journal of International Affairs, 48:2 (1995), pp. 389–431 Google Scholar .

125 See Epstein, Lindemann, and Sending, ‘Frustrated sovereigns’.

126 For our definition of sovereign agency, see Epstein, Lindemann, and Sending, ibid. For the classic and highly resonant statement in deterrence theory, see Bernard Brodie (ed.), The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1946).

127 This state perception is what is studied in the nuclear deterrence literature as ‘existential bias’; see Pelopidas, Benoît, ‘The unbearable lightness of luck: Three sources of overconfidence in the manageability of nuclear crises’, European Journal of International Security, 2:2 (2017), pp. 240–262 CrossRefGoogle Scholar . My purpose here is to draw out its fantasmatic workings.

128 Carol Cohn, in her seminal work on the discourse of defence intellectuals, has underlined the work of this masculinised desire, as well as the compensatory dynamics expressed by this discourse, notably around the metaphors of ‘male birth’. See Cohn, Carol, ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs, 12:4 (1987), pp. 687–718 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

129 See Pelopidas, Benoît, ‘Nuclear weapons scholarship as a case of self-censorship in security studies’, Journal of Global Security Studies, 1:4 (2016), pp. 326–336 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

130 See Pelopidas, ‘The unbearable lightness of luck’, for the dangers of overconfidence this yields in the management of nuclear weapons.

131 The subsequent US administration’s decision to pull out from the agreement and ‘re-securitize’ the nuclear question (moving out of an energy and commercial logic and back into to a security one), is yet another attempt to deny the mutuality and cover over the constitutive dependence that the weapon lays bare. It illustrates this incremental dynamic at work in misrecognition – and the necessity to actively short-circuit it by desecuritising policies in the nuclear space. On securitisation logics, see the classic statement by Wæver, Ole, ‘Securitization and desecuritization’, in Ronnie Libschutz (ed.), On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 41–73 Google Scholar .