concept: to be recognized means to be treated justly; conversely, an unjust
relationship of recognition is in a certain sense not a relationship of recog-
nition at all but a form of misrecognition. Indeed, much of the recent wave of
work on the subject has been devoted to answering the further question
of how, exactly, to distinguish recognition from misrecognition. For
some authors, adequate recognition involves treating others in ways that
conWrm and aYrm their distinctive identities (Taylor 1994 ) or valuable
qualities (Honneth 2002 ). In response to the objection that the politics of
recognition ignores—or, worse, undermines—the malleability of these iden-
tities, other authors have moved toward what might be called formal
rather than substantive criteria of successful recognition: people are recog-
nized properly when they are included in the ongoing collective activity
through which identities are made and remade (Tully 2000 , 2001 ); or
when the institutionalized evaluations to which they are subject permit
them to participate in social life on terms of ‘‘parity,’’ as ‘‘full partners in
interaction’’ (Fraser 2003 b: 36 ); or when such recognition serves the purpose
of overcoming broader ‘‘structural inequalities’’ (Young 2000 , 105 ). Finally,
another group of theorists further complicates the association of recognition
with justice by suggesting that recognition and misrecognition are tightly
connected, not opposed: Lacan, for instance, describes the formation of
the ego through imaginary identiWcation as a kind of necessary misrecogni-
tion ( 2002 , 294 – 5 ); Bourdieu argues that the recognition of a form of
social authority as legitimate is always also a misrecognition of its arbitrari-
ness ( 1977 , 164 ); and I and others have suggested that the desire for the
recognition of identity may itself be an important source of dominative or
exploitative social relations as well as of justice (Markell 2003 ; Povinelli 2002 ;
Oliver 2001 ).
Third,what is the object of recognition; that is, what does an act of recognition
recognize?Political theorists typically conceive of recognition as directed to-
ward identity, and, in theWrst instance anyway, toward the identity of another
person or group (although such other-directed recognition is also typically
understood as part of an exchange through which recognizing subjects
also come to identify themselves). Of course, ‘‘identity’’ can itself be under-
stood in a range of ways. For theorists who approach recognition through
debates over identity politics, identity often refers to a multidimensional set of
aYliations with and diVerences from others along socially salient axes such
recognition and redistribution 455