Olerato Mogomotsi

The far right and its reactionary allies are waging a retaliatory culture war. These reactionaries are in a state of recoil, undoing the recognition gains of the marginalised in liberal societies through a structural reificatory reassertion of cisheteropatriarchy and ethnonationalism. In this article, I argue that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit offers illuminating insights into the onto-phenomenology of reactionary culture wars, particularly regarding the subjects who wage them. I focus on Hegel's articulation of self-consciousness's desire to achieve self-certainty and actuality, the possibility of encountering semblances of the Concept's manifestation in the process of attaining actuality; and the relationship between uncertainty, failure, and sublation. I read the reactionary subject's retaliation as rooted in the breakdown of ‘actuality’ into semblance, as well as a resistance to sublation, which, in my view, explains both the intractability of culture wars and why subjects opt for self-reassertion over self-reimagination.

Axel Honneth's earlier conception of recognition as an ethical ideal has received significant critique from feminist Foucauldian critical theorists, such as Judith Butler, Lois McNay and Amy Allen, for undermining how recognition can often be a conduit for subordination. As a result, there has been an increasing ambivalence about the nature of recognition in the critical theory literature. Seeing that the ambivalence critiques may engender scepticism around the utility of recognition in critical theory, this article seeks to counteract this scepticism. However, rescuing recognition from a terminal scepticism requires that we move away from Honneth's insistence on a normative reading of recognition to a strictly functionalist conception of recognition. This functionalist account of recognition, derived through an exegetical revisiting of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, takes recognition as a tool for or a means of attaining actuality that can be appropriated in various and often conflicting ways.

Haydon White’s Metahistory interprets representations of history as inherently reflecting historians’ subjectivity. That is, the modes in which historians represent history are significantly determined and grounded by their ideological commitments. In this article, I offer a metahistorical analysis of the modes of doing history undertaken by the African Islamic intellectual historians Ousmane Kane and Souleymane Bachir Diagne. I critically evaluate the consistency between the object of history as they assume it to be and the discourses they produce, taking account of their ideologically grounded mode of realizing their chosen object of history. Taking the general object of history for the African intellectual to be the resistance of the colonial library, I argue that, in their pursuit of this object of history, Kane and Diagne fall short owing to their use of the Islamic library to assert the existence of an African intellectual history.