At the Periphery of Recognition: Childhood and Social Exclusion

Dr Joanne Faulkner (University of New South Wales)

This paper considers the peculiar social role of children, by supplementing recognition theory with Lacanian psychoanalysis. My interest, specifically, is the particular quality of misrecognition to which children are prone – a social and political disrespect that, in the case of children (and potentially also other social groups) is only partially comprehended by Honneth’s approach. Honneth’s staging of an encouter between the early Hegel’s account of recognition and the object relations theory of Mead and Winnicott undoubtedly goes a long way to enrich understanding of struggle’s pivotal function in achieving social respect and autonomy. What it does not explain, however, is the part of idealisation, vilification, and exclusion of children as a dimension of adults’ struggle for recognition. The paper will interrogate this nexus between adult identity formation and ‘the child’ in order to test the limits of recognition.

Joanne Faulkner is an ARC DECRA fellow in Philosophy, in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales. Her DECRA project, "The Politicised Child in Postcolonial Community: A Political Ontology of Childhood and Memory examined through cases in Australia and Canada", examines the political use of children and childhood in relation to indigenous politics and discourse surrounding reconciliation in Australia, and forced sterilisation in Canada. She is the author of The Importance of Being Innocent: Why We Worry About Children (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Dead Letters to Nietzsche: Or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy (Ohio University Press, 2010), and co-author (with Matthew Sharpe) of Understanding Psychoanalysis (Acumen, 2008).