V International Conference for Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

Organização: International Society for Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (ISPP)/Société Internationale de Psychanalyse et Philosophie (SIPP)
Local: Santiago (Chile)
Data: 6 a 9 de novembro de 2012

Struggle for recognition and discourse of hysteria in consumer society

CASTRO, J. C. L.

Resumo: Honneth’s work on the struggle for recognition draws on Hegel’s earliest writings. In a parallel vein, Lacan, who reads Hegel through the lens of Kojève, furnishes an account of different moments of Phenomenology of Spirit’s master-slave dialectic with his theory of discourses. One can argue that the way Lacanian discourse of hysteria functions has some structural similarity with the struggle for recognition, since its top line portrays the interpellation of the master signifier, which represents an authority, by the divided subject. Insofar as consumption becomes the main tool for reproduction of capitalist society, both the struggle for recognition and the hysterical social bond increasingly manifest themselves by means of consumption, although neither Honneth nor Lacan envisage explicitly this. But recognition in consumption has an inverted signal, rather undermining inclusion and solidarity than fostering it. We can see it as a failed or distorted recognition, which Honneth relates to social pathology, whereas for psychoanalysis the demand for recognition itself can be pathological (the hysteric not only challenges the master, but needs one). It is also important to note the change in consumption characterized by the passage from Fordist to post-Fordist mode of regulation: recognition in the realm of consumption comes to rely less on the adjustment to general parameters, and more on individual assertion of one’s own style. The turn in Honneth’s theory of recognition, with its emphasis on reification, is useful to capture this change in consumer society; recognition is not opposed so much now to contempt and exclusion, but rather to indifference and blindness. The same holds for Lacan, with the concept of discourse of capitalism (developed after the four radical discourses), which highlights simultaneously the apparent dominance of the subject and his de facto subordination to the object. It’s revealing that, in these later developments of their conceptualizations, both Honneth and Lacan make explicit references to the world of consumption.

Palavras-chave: recognition, discourse of hysteria, reification, discourse of capitalism, consumption, consumer society.