of recognition. If we have, for instance, the act‘Finland recognizes
Israel as the Jewish state’, this performative assumes that Finland
becomes an instance of qualifying the Jewishness of others through
this act. In this quite complex power game, Finland takes over
completely new tasks as a state, to the extent that the issue of‘what
a Jewish state is’receives unexpected new dimensions (‘something
that has been recognized by Finland’). Naming the recognizer and
considering itsfluctuating identity is very important; we return to this
issue in section 4.5.
Thefinal issue with regard to Bedorf’s challenge is the marching
order of cause and effect. In terms of our study, an act‘Finland
recognizes Israel as the Jewish state’ is not a misrecognition
that could be compared with a given standard of adequate recogni-
tions, but the performative creation of a new social reality in which
both Finland and Israel (and the understanding of Jewishness) are
transformed by the act of recognition. While this conclusion high-
lights my stance against Bedorf, it is actually not very far from
what he wants to achieve through involving the analysis of gift
exchange in Derrida, Mauss, and Hénaff. He notes the reciprocal
and relational structure of unilateral recognitions, concluding that
the social bond emerges in the performative structure involving both
A and B.^11
More generally, the category of‘misrecognition’is often employed
in contemporary discussions in ways that need more reflection.^12 In
the light of our proposals, such instances may be concerned with
various misunderstandings of the performative nature of recognition.
As acts of religious recognition establish both the recognizer and the
recognizee, their problems do not merely consist in patronizing the
recognizee. At least in thefirst and second paradigms, the more
urgent problem concerns realizing that the recognizer transforms
himself in his act of religious recognition. This problem remains
relevant for political acts, as the example‘Finland recognizes Israel as
the Jewish state’shows, since such acts say more about the recognizer
(Finland) than the recognizee (Israel) and the issue (Jewishness).
The history of religious recognition underlines thefluctuating identity
of the recognizer and how he or she emerges through the act of recog-
nition. As the grammatical structure‘A recognizes B as X’in modern
(^11) Bedorf 2010, 187–9.
(^12) Cf. McNay 2008; Bedorf 2010; Hoffmann 2013, 320–3; Walter 2013, 71–4.
Recognition in Religion 207