Bound by Recognition
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mutually exclusive alignment of authenticity with death and inauthenticity with birth, which seems wholly alien to Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as always already both thrown and projecting; authenticity may never be pure, but that is not because our natality pulls against our fatedness to death — both are surely complementary aspects of our mortality. He also gives insufficient weight to Heidegger’s explicit recognition of the threat death poses to the intelligibility of our being, and so of Being. Division two of Being and Time begins with the acknowledgement that death is an impossible possibility; the challenge of how phenomenology might make good on that acknowledgement informs the rest of that division, and so the whole of the project of fundamental ontology. It is therefore hard to agree that Being and Time is hamstrung from the outset by its restriction of Being to the domain of human intelligibility. After all, Heidegger begins that book by emphasising that Dasein’s openness to beings, and so to Being, is essentially enigmatic. Stephen Mulhall New College, Oxford, UK.
Bound by Recognition Patchen Markell Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2006, xii þ 284pp. ISBN: 0-691-11382-3. Contemporary Political Theory (2006) 5, 494–496. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300285
This is one case where a rather less emblematic title would be helpful to give the reader some clues, though it would necessarily be rather long and clumsy. Markell has an ambitious project, namely arguing (in subtly qualified ways) against the liberal paradigm and its relentless encouragement of ‘exchanges’ of recognition. According to Markell, these are modelled on an ancient paradigm of distributive justice but updated in contemporary theories of multiculturalism and contemporary practices of multicultural politics, including by extension, recent debates and issues in feminist politics and the politics of sexuality. The book is flawlessly written, not overlong, and transgressively engaged with intellectual figures and stock ideas that need just his kind of shake-up. The author’s tenacious modesty in defending his downbeat conclusions is thoroughly admirable, and not very much the norm in the literatures through which the books ideas are developed. Many readers will enjoy Patchen’s very delicate handling of Arendt, Taylor, Aristotle and Hegel, his up-to-date engagement with current scholarship, and Contemporary Political Theory 2006 5
Book Reviews
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his determination to take some time to explicate concepts of recognition, acknowledgement, sovereignty, tragedy, justice and other topics that he needs to get where he is going. Also there are good discussions of rather less familiar figures, such as Herder, whose shadow still hangs over contemporary accounts of culture and contrasting accounts of agency, according to Markell. When he got to Marx and ‘On the Jewish Question’, I was thrilled by his discussion of that text in context, namely the history of political emancipation for ‘the Jews’ in Prussia and more widely in liberalizi
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