The Experience of Injustice

A Theory of Recognition

Emmanuel Renault, Richard A. Lynch

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231548984
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

In The Experience of Injustice, the French philosopher Emmanuel Renault opens an important new chapter in critical theory. He brings together political theory, critical social science, and a keen sense of the power of popular movements to offer a powerful vision of social justice. Questioning normative political philosophy's conception of justice, Renault gives an account of injustice as the denial of recognition, placing the experience of social suffering at the heart of contemporary critical theory.

Inspired by Axel Honneth, Renault argues that a radicalized version of Honneth's ethics of recognition can provide a systematic alternative to the liberal-democratic projects of such thinkers as Rawls and Habermas. Renault reformulates Honneth's theory as a framework founded on experiences of injustice. He develops a complex, psychoanalytically rich account of suffering, disaffiliation, and identity loss to explain such experiences as denials of recognition, linking everyday injustice to a robust defense of the politicization of identity in social struggles. Engaging contemporary French and German critical theory alongside interdisciplinary tools from sociology, psychoanalysis, socialist political theory, social-movement theory, and philosophy, Renault articulates the importance of a theory of recognition for the resurgence of social critique.

PART I

Injustice and the Denial of Recognition

Chapter One

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND CRITIQUE OF POLITICS

It would be meaningless to speak of any consensus in contemporary political philosophy, since so many theoretical and political disputes run through it. On the other hand, we can ask whether the most widely practiced styles of political philosophy do not all share the same inability to respond to the political disaffection that is contemporary with the revival of normative political philosophy. Jacques Rancière has underscored this paradoxical conjunction between the ongoing disappearance of politics and the revival of political philosophy, noting that “The resurrection of political philosophy thus simultaneously declares itself to be the evacuation of the political by its official representatives.”¹ Must we see this, as Rancière does, as the illustration of an incompatibility between philosophy and politics, or rather of the necessity for philosophy to take up the challenge of a critique of politics? This question stands in a twofold relation with the experience of injustice. On the one hand, disaffection with politics seems to be the result, at least in part, of a narrowing and closure of the space of institutionalized politics which renders politically inexpressible a number of demands by those who suffer injustice, demands that together produce the feeling that political issues no longer have anything to do with real social problems.² On the other hand, by remaining silent about the social disrespect that victims of injustice endure, established politics reinforces the feeling of being disrespected by institutions and produces a social disrespect which is, so to speak, raised to a second power: the experience of a particular social injustice is reinforced by the feeling that those who suffer it do not deserve to be politically accounted for. The question thus arises whether contemporary political philosophies only reproduce the symbolic violence of a public space implicitly declaring that what these individuals suffer in society does not deserve to be taken seriously, or whether, on the contrary, they are able to contribute to shifting political debates that would pay heed to the various contemporary forms of injustice. This amounts to asking how political philosophy can internalize the standpoint of the experience of injustice.

Such an internalization would entail developing a critique of those political forms that serve to hide or make invisible certain kinds of injustice. It would thus entail a broader critique of politics. But clearly this political critique cannot be treated as merely a theoretical question because it also contains a practical dimension—that of social movements. The latter can be considered as a “space of appeals,” in the senses both of a request for answers to social problems and an appeal (in the legal sense) stemming either from the failure to take a demand into account or from the refusal to hear a request in the classical institutional arenas.³ Social movements are able to bring issues into the political public sphere that would otherwise have been left unmentioned.⁴ They appear to be one of the only forces liable to deform the logic of institutionalized politics by breaking down the walls that mark its limits. Are contemporary political philosophies able to take account of this important contribution to the democratization of democracy? This question cannot be dismissed, especially as some on the left defend a strategy to “change the world without taking power,”⁵ no longer hoping to achieve democratization by any other means than through social movements’ laying siege to political institutions. It is not necessary to go as far as that in order to recognize that the political importance of social movements requires that philosophy take account of their particular resources.

CRITIQUE OF POLITICS OR CRITIQUE OF PHILOSOPHY

It could be thought that the success of Rawls’s and Habermas’s political philosophies stems from their desire to struggle against an orientation that reduces the political public sphere to purely technical and administrative questions of territorial management, its security, and economic activity. It is with this end in mind, in fact, that they stress that a democratic life maintains an essential connection to collective deliberation about social justice.⁶ But are their political philosophies able to take in and address injustices about which the established politics is silent? Can they include within their concepts, arguments, and claims the point of view on social injustice adopted by the politically excluded? This question can be understood in a strong sense or a weak one. In a weak sense, it merely urges that the demands of those who suffer injustice in the real world be taken into account. In a strong sense, it demands moreover that political philosophy welcome within itself the ways in which they articulate their demands—in other words, that they take into account the political language of political actors. Political philosophy must meet this twofold challenge, for political disaffection can be the result of a twofold cause. It can be explained either through the absence of a political accounting of certain demands, or through an accounting that renders them unrecognizable by those who articulate them, taken up in a language where the dominated and the deprived can no longer recognize their own aspirations.

We probably ought to credit Rawls and Habermas with trying seriously to take up the more demanding of these two challenges. In fact, they both try to adopt the viewpoint of the socially disadvantaged in order to define the nature of a more just world. Rawls maintains that social and economic inequalities are only justifiable if “they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”⁷ As for Habermas, he posits in principle that political philosophy must take account of “the problems that objectively impose themselves on participants,” and maintains that “[a] social theory claiming to be ‘critical’ cannot restrict itself to describing the relation between norm and reality from the perspective of an observer.”⁸ From this point of view, their approaches are radically different from that of the various forms of contemporary neorepublicanism that criticize social problems, either because they constitute obstacles to full political participation, or because they are likely to lead to the development of the sorts of domination that political participation is intended to abolish. In both cases, the problems suffered by society’s least advantaged are critiqued from a viewpoint that is clearly external to their concerns. When they have an experience of injustice, those least advantaged do not find it intolerable because it might deprive them of full political participation or it might lead them towards new forms of domination. To understand how the dominated and the deprived express their demands, the problematic of justice seems undeniably more pertinent than that of republicanism, and Habermas’s and Rawls’s theories have this advantage. Nonetheless, with both theories, the challenge offered by the language of protest is only partially addressed. In fact, when Rawls claims to adopt the viewpoint of the “least advantaged” and when Habermas proclaims that he starts from “the problems that objectively impose themselves on participants,” they actually describe only the methodological rules to be followed in order to define the principles that a just society must satisfy, not the rules determining the point of view from which these principles must be formulated.

What is justice? Rawls and Habermas answer this question differently, but they both seek the answer within the resources of practical reason. It is in fact citizens’ capacity to be reasonable and rational that allows them, in the circumstances of the original position described by Rawls, to agree upon the principles of justice and to thus assert their fundamental equality. Likewise, for Habermas, it is the moral use of practical reason that provides the ultimate basis for democratic debates and allows one to define the contents of legitimate law.⁹ For both, the structure of principles of justice and fundamental rights is constructed upon the moral capacity to adopt a universal point of view; these principles and rights thus embody, so to speak, the normative potential of practical reason. But this reveals the limits of their theoretico-political project, because it is clear that the political demands of those who suffer injustice are not expressed in the language of the requirements of universality proper to practical reason. We have already said this: most often, experiences of injustice stem from the feeling that one’s life circumstances are unbearable or too degrading, rather than from the consciousness that they violate explicitly formulated principles of justice or fundamental rights, and even less from the conviction that these rights are fundamental because their validity can be rationally demonstrated.

Rawls’s and Habermas’s political philosophies thus fail to completely meet the conditions for the strong version of critique of politics: they do not recognize political demands as they are expressed by those who suffer injustice. On the other hand, they do seem to satisfy the weaker version of critique of politics. To reformulate the demands of those excluded from politics within the language of practical reason indeed seems to be one of their objectives. If the most deprived among us do not interpret the social failings that they experience as a situation’s misalignment with rational principles, this does not for all that mean that these social failings could not be characterized by such misalignment. Would a description in terms of misalignment be able to account for the properly political demands contained within the experiences of injustice that are excluded from the political sphere? Would such a description be the only critique of politics for which philosophy as political philosophy could truly take responsibility? It seems not. These experiences of injustice are the carriers of other political demands, and they define other ways of envisioning the critique of politics.

We should probably begin by noting on this point that the experience of injustice is not so much the experience of an injustice in the sense of a contradiction with an explicit definition of justice, but rather the experience of a relation and a situation. We have already seen that experiences of injustice should be interpreted as experiences of an injury to one’s personal integrity in the sense that they are rooted in the feeling that an essential aspect of one’s dignity is tarnished, a feeling of something intolerable.¹⁰ In its affective aspect, an experience of injustice is an experience of the unbearable, and as an experience of the intolerable, it transforms one’s prereflective experience of oneself and the social environment. When I am the object of an unjust judgment, my own existence becomes a problem for me: I refuse to be what I am recognized to be. Through the intermediary of an other’s recognition, I become other than myself (self-alienation).¹¹ At the same time, the social environment ceases to be self-evident: it appears to me as that which blocks my attempts at recognition; it appears to me as a foreign and hostile world, or as an “alienated” or “estranged” world (world-alienation).¹²

The experience of injustice is one of alienation; it is, moreover, one of an unjust situation. In fact, individuals always associate their feeling of injustice with particular social interactions or contexts, and it is likewise always against the latter that they direct their complaints concerning justice. To be sure, one can have a diffuse intuition of a structural injustice (for example, of the universally unjust character of a structurally inegalitarian society), but the crystallization of such an intuition into a feeling of injustice is always occasioned by a situated injustice, and it is beginning with such feelings that the consciousness of structural components of injustice can then be reflectively articulated. When a denial of recognition is lived as an injustice, one’s attention is directed toward the different means of denying recognition and toward their various justifications.

When individuals suffer social injustice, the specifically political dimension of the experience of injustice is directly tied to this twofold element of alienation—as experience of an alienation and of a situation—as well as to the process of refusal that occurs within this experience. Before being formulated in a political public space, the experience of injustice is political, first as a process inscribed in the qualitative experience of a refusal to accept the intolerable, and as a situated refusal. A first problem is linked to the fact that the point of view most commonly adopted by theories of justice does not allow them to take account of these qualitative and situational components of the experience of justice. A second problem is linked to the fact that their point of view is barely able to account for the dynamics of politicization to which the experience of injustice gives rise, and more generally, to the role that the experience of injustice can play in processes that could contribute to the democratization of democracy.

The contemporary understanding of principles of justice ordinarily leads to an approach to justice that can be called quantitative insofar as it makes justice a question of degrees. Most commonly, it is held that actual social situations can only be more or less in conformity with abstract principles of justice. But what is unbearable is not more or less unbearable, it is simply unbearable. More generally, the confrontation between a situation and principles of justice does not make it possible to take account of the qualitative dimension of the unbearable: one lives with the unbearable; one doesn’t measure it. In the same way, the framework of theories of justice forbids them from accounting for the situational dimension of the experience of injustice. In fact, such theories rest upon the presupposition that it is possible to think about justice as such, abstracted from any diagnosis of the concrete situations that produce injustice. This presupposition leads to the removal of any reference to specific unbearable characteristics from the experience of injustice and, in the same way, to the loss of an abolitionist dimension of the concept of justice. This presupposition leads, moreover, to a static definition of social justice (to a definition of justice as a society’s state), whereas for those who suffer injustice, the primary function of a demand for justice is to guide their efforts in order to transform unjust situations. As described by a theory of justice, injustice is presented not only in another language, but also according to a different logic than that which permeates the experience of injustice. It is always on the verge of losing the essential meanings that it takes on for those who experience it, so that it is the very content of demands for justice, and not only their form, that is thus radically altered. In Rawls’s and Habermas’s theories, this general problem manifests as difficulties (idiosyncratic, to be sure) that are not politically trivial.

We can begin by noting that the quantitative point of view of theories of justice is particularly inadequate when it is a matter of elements as fundamental as personal integrity and self-respect. We know that, for Rawls, justice is defined as the equitable distribution of primary goods, understood as “things that every rational man is presumed to want.”¹³ A Theory of Justice can then present the general conception of justice in the following terms: “All social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all of these values is to everyone’s advantage.”¹⁴ It is already curious that self-respect and liberty would be considered as goods that are liable to be distributed in the same way as wealth. Political problems take shape behind this conceptual problem, political problems that clearly appear in the articulation of the two principles of A Theory of Justice.

Rawls formulates them, for instance, in the following manner:

First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.

Second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.¹⁵

The social bases of self-respect are arranged (just like wealth) among the advantages of social cooperation that, along with equality of opportunity, constitute the subject of the second principle. Rawls thus affirms that a just society is not only defined by an equitable distribution of opportunities and wealth, but also by an equitable distribution of self-respect. This seems to mean the following: just like wealth, social disrespect could be unequally distributed among social groups in a just society, ...