Risking Recognition

"When Hegel introduces the notion of recognition in the section on lordship and bondage in The Phenomenology of Spirit, he narrates the primary encounter with the Other in terms of self-loss. "Self-consciousness...has come out of itself...it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being". One might understand Hegel to be describing merely a pathological state in which a fantasy of absorption by the Other constitutes an early or primitive experience. But he is saying something more. He is saying that whatever consciousness is, whatever the self is, will find itself only through a reflection of itself in another. To be itself, it must pass through self-loss, and when it passes through, it will never be "returned" to what it was. To be reflected in or as another will have a double significance for consciousness, however, since consciousness will, through the reflection, regain itself in some way. But it will, by virtue of the external status of reflection, regain itself as external to itself, and hence, continue to lose itself. Thus the relationship to the Other will invariably be ambivalent. The price of self-knowledge will be self-loss, and the Other poses the possibility of both securing and undermining self-knowledge. What becomes clear, though, is that the self never returns to itself free of the Other, that it's relationality becomes constitutive of who the self is."

"Negation is a destruction that is survived."

Ref: 

Butler, J. (2010). Longing for Recognition in (K Hutchings and T Pulkkinen, Eds) Hegel's Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone?. New York: Palgrave. p. 109 - 132.