Living Labs are increasingly promoted with an aim to support sustainability transitions or transformations. In this article we explore the transformative potential of Living Labs, by interactively assessing three Living Labs for biodiversity recovery in the Netherlands with the aid of an existing reflexive assessment framework. Potentially transformative aspects of Living Labs include their local grounding and their focus on change, their diverse composition and embeddedness in larger networks, the building of bridging social capital, forms of experimentation and knowledge coproduction, (...) their collaborative mode of operation, and actionable outputs. On the basis of this assessment, we propose that the transformative potential of Living Labs lies in their inherent collaborative mode of working, their focus on shifting practices, and their ability to contribute to shifting views through experimentation and learning. However, their transformative potential is also limited because they are less able to challenge, let alone disrupt. In addition, they have a limited focus on shifting structures. We propose that the nature of Living Labs will inherently limit their transformative potential. We conclude with recommendations to enhance the transformative potential of Living Labs in a network of networks. For example, Living Labs may raise their transformative ambitions, and more carefully consider their composition to include stakeholders that can help to achieve change. At the same time, we recommend to not expect too much of Living Labs, but to put complementary transformative strategies in place. (shrink)

v. 1. De l'ineffable et de l'Un -- v. 2. De la triade et de l'unifié -- v. 3. De la procession.

It has often been argued that Foucault’s turn to antique and early Christian care of the self, spiritual self-.practices and truth-telling (parrhesia) results from inquiries into the confession practices and pastoral power structures in the context of a genealogy of the desiring subject. This line of reasoning is in itself not incorrect, but – this article claims – needs to be complemented with an account of Foucault’s philosophical quest for freedom and for conditions, possibilities and modes of thinking and acting (...) differently vis-à-vis the normalizing regimes of power in science and, hence, in philosophy as an academic discipline. In this context a first turn to antique philosophy seen as a ‘way of life’ constructed through ascetic practices can be detected already writings from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although indeed the project of the history of sexuality moved in a direction than Foucault had foreseen in the first volume published in 1976, earlier reflections on the need for free and critical philosophical thought relative to scientific ‘disciplines’ already prelude the later inquiries into care of the self, self-practices and parrhesia as productive for a critical philosophical attitude. (shrink)

Dans ce volume considérable, on été réunies les contributions d'un Congrès international tenu à Louvain en 1998 pour marquer l'achèvement de la première édition de la Théologie Platonicienne de Proclus. Ces contributions, toutes rigoureusement centrées sur la Théol. Plat. concernent (1) les principes et les sources de la Théol. plat. (2) Les méthodes théologiques de Proclus (3) La postérité de la Théol. plat. dans le monde grec, païen comme chrétien, et dans le monde islamique. Des indices très détaillés permettent de (...) retrouver tous les passages cités et commentés dans ce volume. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that the apparent vagueness and broadness of the concept ‘spirituality’ and the difficulty in finding an agreeable definition for it are related to the different meanings of the concept within different intellectual and religious contexts and, subsequently, to different valuations of spirituality in relation to religion and lived religiosity. This article also examines the concept spirituality in the context of the psychology of religion's historical entanglement with theology. On the one hand, the psychology of (...) religion has emancipated itself from theological discourse and theological institutions. On the other hand, the psychology of religion is still closely connected to a modernist theological project of founding religiousness in a province of the mind that resists religious critique of traditional contents and institutional structures in a secular era. The author pleas for more differentiation between theistic and non-theistic dimensions of the concept spirituality. (shrink)

Foucault and the problematics of the will in Cassian and Augustine Although John Cassian and Augustine are contemporaries involved in debates on (free) will, sin and grace, Foucault in Confessions of the Flesh closely examines these two authors in different text parts without confronting their positions regarding their conceptualization of the libido and the problem of a sinful will. In this article Augustine’s and Cassian’s view of this problematics is elaborated as two positions in the same debate. It is argued (...) that Foucault, reading Cassian as a monastic author introducing new forms of submission, confession and meticulous hermeneutics of the self, undervalues the act that the demand of mortification of the will through unconditional obedience can be seen as part of self-practices and exercises of the will. (shrink)

In his 1959–1960 seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan states that one can only fully understand the intellectual (philosophical, ethical) problems Freud addresses when one recognizes the filiation or cultural paternity that exists between him and a new direction of thought represented by Luther. In this article Lacan’s interest in Luther’s theological voluntarism, his conception of God, his articulation of what Lacan identifies as the modern crisis in ethics and his view on the law in (...) relation to desire is presented and analysed. It is argued that Lacan is primarily interested in Luther as a religious author radically expressing the problem of the foundation of moral law and addressing the question how and where a person finds moral orientation after the break with the medieval Aristotelian-scholastic universal order and given man’s sinful desires. (shrink)

Early modernity is characterized by intensified and in-depth Christianization processes and the development of various models for religious subjectivity. Experiences of anxiety, despair and abandonment often play a central role in the religious literature and practices, notably in a protestant context in which there are intense debates on the place and value of such experiences in religious life. What is the relation between faith and despair? Can one distinguish spiritual despair from melancholia? What is the role played by the doctrine (...) of predestination in faith practices that include despair and desire? This book explores such questions through a reading of a variety of sources with the use of philosophical and psychoanalytical theories and perspectives: the life of Francis Spira, Luther, Calvin, Willem Teellinck, Gisbertus Voetius and Jean de Labadie. (shrink)

Working from an innovative perspective, this book explores the close relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and the ideas of the early Reformation.

Sigmund Freud's 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a founding text of psychoanalysis and yet it remains to a large extent an "unknown" text. In this book Freud's 1905 theory of sexuality is reconstructed in its historical context, its systematic outline, and its actual relevance. This reconstruction reveals a non-oedipal theory of sexuality defined in terms of autoerotic, non-objectal, physical-pleasurable activities originating from the "drive" and the excitability of erogenous zones. This book, consequently, not only calls for (...) a reconsideration of the development of Freudian thinking and of the status of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis but also has a strong potential for supporting contemporary non-heteronormative theories of sexuality. It is as such that the 1905 edition of Three Essays becomes a highly relevant document in contemporary philosophical discussions of sexuality. This book also explores the inconsistencies and problems in the original theory of sexuality, notably the unresolved question of the transition from autoerotic infantile sexuality to objectal adult sexuality, as well as the theoretical and methodological shifts present in later editions of Three Essays. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and those with an academic interest in the history of psychoanalysis and sexuality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which you (...) seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

Contains responses from social critic Judith Butler to essays on her work from across the social sciences, humanities, and behavioral sciences.

The Judith Butler Reader is a collection of writings that span her impressive career and trace her intellectual history. Judith Butler, author of influential books such as Gender Trouble, has built her international reputation as a theorist of power, gender, sexuality and identity Organized in active collaboration between Judith Butler and Sara Salih Collects together writings that span Butler’s impressive career as a critical philosopher, including selections from both well-known and lesser-known works Includes an introduction and editorial (...) material to assist students in their readings of theories that stand at the forefront of contemporary theoretical and political debates. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a (...) reiterated social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Luther ist nur eine Stimme unter den spätmittelalterlichen Reformbewegungen. Die historische Forschung stellt die Lutherische Reformation inzwischen in den breiten Strom christlicher Reformbewegungen seit dem 13. Jahrhundert. Vor diesem Hintergrund muss auch das aufklärerische Bild von Luther als einem Protagonisten der Neuzeit revidiert werden. Die Vielfalt spätmittelalterlicher Reformbewegungen bis hin zum Trienter Konzil bildet zusammen mit dem Renaissancehumanismus ein reiches Reservoir an geistigen Aufbrüchen, von denen zahlreiche Beziehungen zur Moderne ausgehen. Mit diesem komplexen Geflecht zwischen christlichen Reformation(en) und Moderne beschäftigen (...) sich die ausgewählten Studien in diesem Band sowohl aus theologischer als auch philosophischer Perspektive. The contemporary historical research situates Luther’s Reformation in a much larger context of Christian reform movements that emerge in the late medieval and early modern period. Against this background the enlightened view of Luther as protagonist of the modern era is in need of revision. The variety of reform movements together with the Renaissance humanism compose a rich reservoir of spiritual reforms that will all influence the further development of the modern era. In this volume, this complex of the variety of Christian reforms relative to modernity is elaborated through exemplary studies from a philosophical-theological perspective. (shrink)

In this profound appraisal of post-September 11, 2001 America, Judith Butler considers the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from the attack on the US, and US retaliation. Judith Butler critiques the use of violence that has emerged as a response to loss, and argues that the dislocation of first-world privilege offers instead a chance to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized and in which interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for a (...) global political community. (shrink)

The concept of a right is fundamental to moral, political, and legal thinking, but much of the use of that concept is selective and fragmentary: it is common merely to appeal to this or that intuitively plausible attribution of rights as needed for purposes of argument. In The Realm of Rights Judith Thomson provides a full-scale, systematic theory of human and social rights, bringing out what in general makes an attribution of a right true.

Judith Jarvis Thomson; Killing, Letting Die, and The Trolley Problem, The Monist, Volume 59, Issue 2, 1 April 1976, Pages 204–217, https://doi.org/10.5840/monis.

With the same intellectual courage with which she addressed issues of gender, Judith Butler turns her attention to speech and conduct in contemporary political life, looking at several efforts to target speech as conduct that has become subject to political debate and regulation. Reviewing hate speech regulations, anti-pornography arguments, and recent controversies about gay self-declaration in the military, Judith Butler asks whether and how language acts in each of these cultural sites.

The author considers the way in which psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. Power is no longer understood to be 'internalized' by an existing subject, but the subject is spawned as an ambivalent effect of power, one that is staged through the operation of conscience. To claim that power fabricates the psyche is also to claim that there is a (...) fictional and fabricated quality to the psyche. The figure of a psyche that 'turns against itself' is crucial to this study, and offers an alternative to describing power as 'internalized'. Although most readers of Foucault eschew psychoanalytic theory, and most thinkers of the psyche eschew Foucault, the author seeks to theorize this ambivalent relation between the social and the psychic as one of the most dynamic and difficult effects of power. (shrink)

Moral theory should be simple: the moral theorist attends to ordinary human action to explain what makes some acts right and others wrong, and we need no microscope to observe a human act. Yet no moral theory that is simple captures all of the morally relevant facts. In a set of vivid examples, stories, and cases Judith Thomson shows just how wide an array of moral considerations bears on all but the simplest of problems. She is a philosophical analyst (...) of the highest caliber who can tease a multitude of implications out of the story of a mere bit of eavesdropping. She is also a master teller of tales which have a philosophical bite. Beyond these pleasures, however, she brings new depth of understanding to some of the most pressing moral issues of the moment, notably abortion. Thomson's essays determinedly confront the most difficult questions: What is it to have a moral right to life, or any other right? What is the relation between the infringement of such rights and restitution? How is rights theory to deal with the imposition of risk? (shrink)

Goodness -- Goodness properties -- Expressivism -- Betterness relations -- Virtue/kind properties -- Correctness properties (acts) -- Correctness properties (mental states) -- Reasons-for (mental states) -- Reasons-for (acts) -- On some views about "ought" : relativism, dilemmas, means-ends -- On some views about "ought" : belief, outcomes, epistemic ought -- Directives -- Addendum 1: "Red" and "good" -- Addendum 2: Correctness -- Addendum 3: Reasons -- Addendum 4: Reasoning.

This classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the genesis and trajectory of the desiring subject from Hegel's formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit to its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Judith Butler plots the French reception of Hegel and the successive challenges waged against his metaphysics and view of the subject, all while revealing ambiguities within his position. The result is a sophisticated reconsideration of the post-Hegelian tradition (...) that has predominated in modern French thought, and her study remains a provocative and timely intervention in contemporary debates over the unconscious, the powers of subjection, and the subject. (shrink)

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler's philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up (...) with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power. Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler's embodied account of ethical relations. (shrink)

The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the world: the many ways humans rely on one another, how we vitally and sometimes fatally breathe the same air, share the surfaces of the earth, and exist in proximity to other porous creatures in order to live in a social world. What we require to live can also imperil our lives. How do we think from, and about, this common bind? Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and (...) all its consequences—political, social, ecological, economic—have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing, capacities that amid a viral outbreak can threaten life itself, challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood. Criticizing notions of unlimited personal liberty and the killing forces of racism, sexism, and classism, this book suggests that the pandemic illuminates the potential of shared vulnerabilities as well as the injustice of pervasive inequalities. Exposing and opposing forms of injustice that deny the essential interrelationship of living creatures, Butler argues for a radical social equality and advocates modes of resistance that seek to establish new conditions of livability and a new sense of a shared world. (shrink)

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to_ Vulnerability in Resistance_ articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, (...) resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power. Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Basak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis. (shrink)

Judith Wagner DeCew provides a solid philosophical foundation for legal discussions of privacy by articulating and unifying diverse arguments on the right to privacy and on how it should be guaranteed in various contemporary contexts. Philosophers and legal theorists tend either to define privacy narrowly or to abandon privacy as conceptually incoherent, she claims. In order to assess how far privacy should extend, and determine how the wide range of specific cases can be reconciled, DeCew surveys the history of (...) the notion of privacy as it first evolved in American tort law and constitutional law and then analyzes current characterizations. In different contexts, privacy has been defined on the basis of information, autonomy, property, and intimacy. DeCew's broader claim is that privacy has fundamental value because it allows us to create ourselves as individuals, offering us freedom from judgment, scrutiny, and the pressure to conform. Feminist theorists often view privacy as a tool for shielding abuses. DeCew responds to this feminist critique of privacy, as well as addressing the issues of abortion and of gay and lesbian sexuality in the context of specific landmark legal cases. In discussions of Roe v. Wade, Bowers v. Hardwick, and the Hart/Devlin debates on decriminalization of homosexuality and prostitution, DeCew applies her broad theory to sexual and reproductive privacy, anti-sodomy laws, and the legislation and enforcement of morals. She finally discusses the intersection of privacy with public safety concerns, such as drug testing, and in light of new communication technologies, such as caller ID. (shrink)

A look at political ethics covers cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal and misanthropy, and is accompanied by a description of modern public opinion about ...

Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. Butler engages thinkers (...) such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel's claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew. Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler's startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 22-40 [Access article in PDF] Giving an Account of Oneself Judith Butler In recent years, the critique of poststructuralism, itself loquacious, has held that the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding undermines the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself. Critics have argued that the various critical reconsiderations of the subject, including those that do away with the (...) theory of the subject altogether, cannot provide the basis for an account of responsibility, that if we are, as it were, divided, ungrounded, or incoherent from the start, it will be impossible to ground a notion of personal or social responsibility on the basis of such a view. I would like to try to rebut this view in what follows, and to show how a theory of subject-formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can work in the service of a conception of ethics and, indeed, of responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, it is not therefore licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its relations to others. Indeed, if it is precisely by virtue of its relations to others that it is opaque to itself, and if those relations to others are precisely the venue for its ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject's opacity to itself that it sustains some of its most important ethical bonds.In all the talk about the social construction of the subject, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other—in its singularity, as Levinas would have it, though surely that—but also on the possibility that the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening. This opening calls into question the limits of established regimes of truth, where a certain risking of the self becomes, as Levinas claims, the sign of virtue [see Foucault]. Whether or not the Other is singular, the Other is recognized and confers recognition through a set of norms that govern recognizability. So whereas the Other may be singular, if not radically personal, the norms are to some extent impersonal and indifferent, and they introduce a disorientation of perspective for the subject in the midst of recognition as an encounter. For if I understand myself to be conferring recognition on you, for instance, then I take seriously that the recognition comes from me. But in the moment that I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone, that I did not singlehandedly make them, then I am, as it were, dispossessed by the language that I offer. In a sense, I submit to a norm of recognition when I offer recognition to you, so that I am both subjected to that norm and the agency of its use.As Hegel would have it, recognition cannot be unilaterally given. In the moment that I give it, I am potentially given it, and the form by which I offer it is one that potentially is given to me. In this sense, one might say, I can never offer it, in the Hegelian sense, as a pure offering, since I am receiving it, at least potentially and structurally, in the moment, in the act, of giving. We might ask, as Levinas surely has, what kind of gift this is that returns to me so quickly, that never really leaves my hands. Is it the case that recognition consists, as it does for Hegel, in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that [End Page 22] the Other is structured in the same way that I am, and I recognize that the Other also makes, or can make, this very recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps an encounter with alterity here that is not reducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity? On the one hand, the Hegelian Other is always found outside, or at least... (shrink)