A number of them were evidence of carelessness But the tension is to look for in figures The number 13 is the atomic number of aluminumA profusion of art celebrate the marriagesThis is why we are delighted to sell it from April 81 billion before taxes in the last quarterBut excluding transport the increase is 0We have become explorers of unknown lands50 with a fall at the global level of 74 to 57You call the State to rescue social securityTHE SOCIETY OF CONTEMPT
by Axel Honneth
Ed. The discovery, 350 pages,
25 euros.
It should be sufficient to recall that Axel Honneth is, at the head of the Frankfurt School, the successor to Horkeimer, Adorno and Habermas, for French readers feel the need to become familiar with his work. Those who have not read his book, contempt ".
The essential mutation by current sociologists of the Frankfurt School's amended the design of social conflict that were their predecessors still inspired by Marxism. Explain social struggles by the only economic analysis of the exploitation of the workers appear them insufficient. This is to forget that if individuals need to physically exist, it is also vital for them to become someone, to acquire an identity. However, to do this, they need to be recognized by others. In this perspective, conflicts that seem to be conflicting material interests show finally be struggles for recognition. Most of the social pathologies can then be explained by the existence of conditions which prevent individuals access to their self-fulfilment through of the recognition by others.
Violent actions
Analyses of Axel Honneth News appears particularly on the face of the chapter of his latest book devoted to the invisibility. Nothing reflects better the denial of recognition by someone that the feeling of becoming invisible to the other, their eyes through without seeing them. It is to think of suburban youth movements or events anti-CPE to perceive how they fired their force of the sense of contempt that may experience of young people who are convinced have become invisible in their society. But the same denial of recognition affects many other social categories and sociologists who tried to identify the type of victims commuters, discriminated against, removable, disabled, sans-domicile, etc. had good reason to call their work: "The invisible France" (La Découverte, 2006). This invisibility also explains that it is quite pointless to ask whether the claims of some of these movements of today are rationally justified. Regardless, indeed, their content once the transition to the action violent is, for the mutiny, the only way to become "visible" in the eyes of society.
Against the managerial ideology
No less current are the chapters where Axel Honneth denounced the altered forms of recognition. One of his favorite targets is the managerial ideology. In appearance, it has intelligently taken into account the modern need for recognition. Evidenced by the fact that it does more work as a submission to a constraint, but as an act of personal achievement. Told employees: "be the entrepreneurs of yourselves." The misfortune is that this so-called self-actualization is tolerated if it fits within a prescribed pattern: she appears as a means to accept the employee workload increased. Give the appearance of extended individual autonomy has become the best way to legitimize deregulation, flexibility and precariousness. Focus on individual initiative is to establish a new standard to which it is not question of escape.
In conclusion, summarizes Axel Honneth, the need of self-fulfilment and recognition of the individual "has been so instrumentalisé, standardized, fictionnalisé," to whom it is reversed in requirements largely dehumanized system under the effects of which subjects now more appear to suffer that flourish.
