My panel contribution will reframe the question of identity politics from the perspective of a (supposedly) underlying philosophical debate, namely between poststructuralism and Critical Theory. I will begin by sketching the positions of the early figures in the respective movements, notably Adorno and Foucault. Building up on a recent discussion between Harcourt, Saar, and Bianchi, called “The Critique and Politics of Identity” (2022), about the affinities and differences between those two approaches and their relation to contemporary identity politics, I will further elaborate on how they conceptualize questions of subject formation and subjectivation to ideology or systems of power-knowledge. In a second step, I will move on to what might be seen as the mitigated continuation of the previous debate through Honneth’s and Butler’s discussion about recognition theory (culminating in the recent joint publication "Recognition and Ambivalence," Columbia UP, 2022). I will start by clarifying the popular formulation of recognition as underlying essential concept in (identity-based) social struggles (Honneth) to go over to Butler’s (partly Foucauldian) critique of this perspective, introducing their concepts of “recognizability,” “susceptibility” and “fields of intelligibility.” Towards the end, I will propose an outlook of how coalition-building and solidarity formation can be (both theoretically and practically) rethought using this terminology to open up the discussion about the degree to which this may represent an alternative mode of thinking about “identity politics” without subscribing to a (necessarily or potentially) essentializing and rigid understanding of the self.
