GAZE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
GAZE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Summary/Abstract: Alexander Kiossev outlines a particular form of non-recognition and disregard that slips out of analysis within Honneth’s model focused on forms of recognition and non-recognition in three main spheres: love, law and labour. What Kiossev brings to the fore are those socially constructed forms of immediate perception, namely, the social gaze, that does not recognize the inherent distinction of the other, that merges the distinctive others into one generalized image thus depriving them of their “right of distinctiveness.” In other words, Kiossev presents one ideal-typical form of social perception that regardless of its substantive variations runs along the axis between the “great I” (or “we”) and “all the others”: no matter what these others really are, no matter what dentity/difference claims they rise, they are nevertheless indistinguishable (not in relation to us but in relation to one another) and for ever stigmatized “others” – either Africans, Balkan people, post-communist countries, etc. Resting on the experience of the post-colonial critique Kiossev reinforces his thesis by emphasizing that such discursive forms of disregard are being incorporated at a pre-discursive level, namely, the level of gaze and perception. His statement is that the act of distinguishing as a minimal recognition of distinction is an elementary logical premise of interaction and evidently, a basic problem for any social theory. Respectively, the act of non-distinguishing is an elementary form of causing a moral damage.

• Details
• Contents