Abstract
Soreanu discusses the idea of recognition in terms of ‘registers of the social’. There are always smaller or greater mis-inscriptions, mis-translations, mis-recognitions traversing the social domain. There is an inclination (of traumatic origin) to answer a social demand in a social language other than the one in which it was originally formulated. The chapter asks questions about the metapsychology of recognition, and about the psychic fragments that are involved in the acts of denial or recognition. Taking the confusion of tongues seriously creates a novel strand of critical theory, where the forms of dismemberment and fragmentation of the psyche are carefully investigated. Soreanu theorises the confusion of tongues between the ‘register of redistribution’ and the ‘register of recognition’ and their manifestation during the Brazilian uprising.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Benjamin (1980).
- 2.
In Ferenczi’s work dedicated to the importance of regression and reliving during the psychoanalytic treatment, this proposition gains clinical flesh. See especially Ferenczi (1932a).
- 3.
- 4.
While Jessica Benjamin’s intersubjective theory of recognition acknowledges the importance of psychic splitting, there is no account in her formulation of the way different psychic fragments resulting from splitting fit in the act of recognition/mis-recognition. See Benjamin: ‘[…] this leads to an important point: a person may develop the capacities for mentalization and self-regulation even while organizing the self in terms of such splits. The full experience of knowing and being known while trusting in the lawful world, such as we aim for in psychoanalysis, requires overcoming these splits. If we accept this way of thinking about recognition as a motivating need – a need that “drives” the psyche (to use an outmoded phrase) since without it we are alone and unsafe – then we may end up not far from Freud’s (1930) original powerful insight that the child renounces parts of his psyche to stay connected to the parent (authority figure), to keep mother or father’s love. Recognition of one part is renounced to attain safe inhabiting of another. The alienation of self from its own needs through splitting and dissociation follows upon the denial of recognition; these alienating forms aim to get around the of the needed caregiver attention, that which alone stabilizes the psyche. If too much of what a child initiates is rejected and refused, rather than recognized and responded to, the ability to respond to other minds will be impaired as vital parts of self have been dissociated: e.g. experiences of excitement, pain, fear have become disavowed, “Not-me” in Sullivan’s term (1953). This, in short, is the phenomenology of our psychic life as it evolved in the history of psychoanalytic theorizing of object relations. In this way an important bridge was built between early mental development and clinical experience, and as it turns out, social relations in general. Simply, we may say that object relations theory assumed, but did not formulate, a tacit phenomenology of recognition’ (Benjamin 2018, pp. 9–10).
- 5.
Axel Honneth (2008) adopts a monistic position, attempting to integrate, and thus de-ontologise recognition and reification. In particular, Honneth argues that the economic order is actually constituted through institutionalised ‘interpretations of the achievement principle, which give it a particular shape in the form of a division of labour and a distribution of status’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003, pp. 155–156). It is both a conceptual and an empirical mistake to treat the capitalist economy as isolated from patterns of cultural valuation, as following a norm-free, autonomous logic of its own. Despite this promising form of monism , Honneth (1996) does ontologise the distinction between three spheres of recognition: family, state and civil society. He inherits these spheres from Hegel. In the sphere of the family, Honneth puts forth a normative view, where the family becomes the primary site through which the need for affective recognition is satisfied, enabling individuals to have the first experiences of confidence and self-esteem. This formulation reinforces the dichotomy between the public and the private, and relegates the family to the latter (McNay 2008a, b).
- 6.
- 7.
Jessica Benjamin (2018, p. 61) does provide a discussion on the important of reenactment in analysis, but this is not extended to any collective ‘frames’.
- 8.
I preserve the hyphen as a marker of the ontological strength of rhythm. It is worth noting that the term ‘rhythmanalysis’ was not coined by Lefebvre. Lefebvre was influenced by Gaston Bachelard (1936), who dedicates a chapter to ‘rhythmanalysis’ in his book La Dialectique de la Durée. Bachelard himself had borrowed the term from a little known Portuguese-Brazilian philosopher, Lúcio Pinheiro dos Santos, who had sent a two volume treaty on rhythmanalysis to Bachelard around 1931, so some five years before the publication of Bachelard’s reflection on duration. This treaty has not survived. Bachelard provides a synthesis of the rhythmanalytic proposition of Lúcio Pinheiro dos Santos, pointing to the fact that the latter studies the phenomenology of rhythm having in mind three different dimensions: material, biologic and psychological.
- 9.
As Lefebvre elaborates on the triad ‘time-space-energy’, ‘[t]hese three terms are needed for describing and analysing cosmological reality. No single one suffices, nor any single term-to-term opposition. Time and space without energy remain inert in the incomplete concept. Energy animates, reconnects, renders time and space conflictual. Their relation confers concrete universality upon these concepts’ (Lefebvre 2004, p. 60).
- 10.
See Castoriadis (1987) on ‘the shock of what is’.
- 11.
See Castoriadis’ (1987) notion of ‘free energy’ and its ontological possibilities.
- 12.
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Soreanu, R. (2018). Registers. In: Working-through Collective Wounds. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58523-3_4
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