The Dialectic of Emancipation in the Struggle for Recognition: Thinking with Georg Hegel, Frantz Fanon and Axel Honneth

Abstract

According to Hegel, if self-consciousness is only possible in and for itself when it so exists for another – from an intersubjective relationship with another self-consciousness – it would be presupposed, at first, a movement of recognition that underlies an ethical relationship between subjects. Thus, understanding oneself as an autonomous subject would concern a relationship of reciprocity between two independent consciousnesses that recognize each other. However, unfortunately not always our relationships were or are based on "mutual recognition". For Fanon, for example, black people, in a racist society, would not have "ontological resistance", so the Hegelian dialectic would not account for the relationship between whites (colonizers) and blacks (colonized) in the colonial world. As a result of the non-recognition, Honneth, in turn, will point out several negative factors for the individual's psychic and identity integrity. The article, then, seeks to forge a debate on the "struggle for recognition" in order to (re)think the idea of "social justice" today, based on the theoretical contributions of these three authors.