Response to Roundtable Discussion


In this text I will deal with three worries that were articulated by my three responders in astounding unanimity: firstly, I will defend the nation-based framework of my history of the idea of recognition on basis of the well-established hypothesis that there is path-dependency of later aesthetic or theoretical productions (1); secondly, I hope to be able to demonstrate that the various theories of subjectivity I investigate can in fact all be subsumed under the concept of “recognition” (2); and thirdly, I will try to clarify the motives I had for synthetizing the three different concepts of recognition in one single approach (3). In an extra step at the end of my article I explain why I don’t see myself making the mistake to assign philosophy the function of something amounting to a leading discipline in the history of ideas (4).