The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law)

by Thom van Dooren

From the foundational work of Hegel and J. G. Fichte onward, philosophers have emphasized the significance of intersubjective recognition and the way in which our understandings of ourselves are influenced by others’ ways of seeing us, including misrecognitions and a lack of recognition. Identities are at stake here, alongside much broader possibilities for flourishing forms of life (Honneth 1995, 169).27 In this context too, recognition is explicitly not a question of preformed subjects entering into relationship with one another. Hegel’s thought in this area worked in explicit opposition to the atomistic notions of the self-forming individual that dominated philosophical thought in his day (and still do in many ways). In contrast, his emphasis on recognition was grounded in the understanding that, as Nancy Fraser (2003, 10) has put it, “social relations are prior to individuals and intersubjectivity is prior to subjectivity.” In other words, subjects are made and remade in their relatings, reaching into one another, mutually imbricated from the outset.28 Paying attention