In Recognition

Once, as the prophet Elijah was walking along, he met Lilith and her host. He said to her: O Lilith, whither do you go with your unclean host? And she replied: My Lord Elijah, I am about to go to the woman who has born a child to bring her to the sleep of death, to take the child born to her away from her, to drink its blood, to suck the morrow from its bones and to leave its flesh over. Elijah answered and said: I place you under a great ban, so that you may be turned into a speechless stone through the will of God. And Lilith said: My Lord, for God's sake, lift this spell so that I might fly away. I swear in the name of God that I will avoid the paths that lead to a woman with a newborn child. Whenever I see or hear my name, I will disappear at once. I will tell you my secret names. Whenever you pronounce these neither I nor my host will have the power to enter the house of a woman in childbirth and torment her. I swear to you to reveal my names so that you may write them down and hang them in the room where the newborn child lies...Whosoever knows these names, and writes them down, ensures that I will flee from the newborn child.'
~ Jewish Babylonian myth of Lilith

Recognition is so organic to the human experience of feeling in existence that its ubiquitous presence goes unseen. It is naturally present from the moment of birth, that first exquisite moment of eye-to-eye contact between mother and baby at birth.

Recogniton confirms our very humanity, ourself, to self.

Jessica Benjamin uses sunlight as a metaphor for recognition - the essential element for a plant's constant transformation of substance.

Near-synonyms for recognition, dance, such:

- affirm
- reverie
- acknowledge
- know
- accept
- understand
- empathise
- take in
- tolerate
- appreciate
- see
- find familiar
- become intimate with
- love

Recognition brings to life, in the kernel of recognition is the endless play into ongoing integration, even in death, even in death.

Longing for Recognition

One of the distinctive contributions of Benjamin’s theory is to insist that intersubjectivity is not the same as object relations, and that 'intersubjectivity' adds to object relations the notion of an external Other, one who exceeds the psychic construction of the object in complementary terms. What this means is that whatever the psychic and fantasmatic relation to the object may be, it ought to be understood in terms of the larger dynamic of recognition. The relation to the object is not the same as the relation to the Other, but the relation to the Other provides a framework for understanding the relation to the object. The subject not only forms certain psychic relations to objects, but the subject is formed by and through those psychic relations. Moreover, these various forms are implicitly structured by a struggle for recognition in which the Other does and does not become dissociable from the object which is psychically represented. This struggle is represented by a desire to enter into a communicative practice with the Other in which recognition takes place neither as an event nor a set of events, but as an onging process, one that also poses the psychic risk of destruction. Whereas Hegel refers to a 'negation' as the risk that recognition always runs, Benjamin retains this term to describe the differentiated aspect of rationality: the other is not me, and from this distinction, certain psychic consequences follow....For Benjamin, humans form psychic relations with Others on the basis of a necessary negation, but not all of those relations must be destructive. Whereas the psychic response that seeks to master and dispel that negation is destructive, that destruction is precisely what needs to be worked through in the process of recognition.

Adapted from:

Ayers, M. (2011). Masculine shame: from succubus to the eternal feminine. London: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2000). Longing for Recognition: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 1:27.