Axel Honneth & Jacques Rancière, Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity

Résumé En

Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière are two of the most renowned European philosophers writing today, each representing in eminent fashion the two traditions of German and French post-Marxist philosophy. Axel Honneth has become famous for his philosophical critique of modern society centered on the concept of recognition. Jacques Rancière for his part has elaborated an influential theory and critique of modern politics based on the notion of disagreement. Underpinning their thinking lays a shared concern towards the logics of exclusion and domination that structure contemporary societies. Their prominence and the many points of overlap and divergence between their thoughts make a comparative study an obvious task, and yet very little has been done to date in this direction. This volume is a significant step towards addressing this gap. At its heart, the book features a fascinating discussion between the two philosophers, following a meeting that took place in Frankfurt a few years ago. In this critical, lively but always respectful encounter, each of the thinkers addresses questions and challenges to the other, before they engage in a direct exchange over key aspects of their approaches. The conversation is preceded by substantive presentations from the editors, which set the stage for the discussion. In the last section of the book, Honneth and Rancière propose original texts, which deepen the understanding of their current thinking in important ways. This encounter between two major thinkers of our time, framed and complemented by contributions from two experts in the field and concluded by an up-to-date bibliography, significantly extends the scholarship in contemporary critical theory and political theory.