Amy Allen (Penn State) will discuss her paper “Recognizing Ambivalence:  Honneth, Butler, and Philosophical Anthropology” with us. The paper is to be read it in advance so please register, in case you’re interested, by sending an email to r.celikates@uva.nl . Location: Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, Faculteitskamer/Faculty Room, Oude Turfmarkt 147 (entrance at 141), Amsterdam. Abstract: In this paper I argue that Judith Butler’s criticism of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition is properly directed not at his account of antecedent recognition, but rather at his account of love, which, in Honneth’s theory, is the primordial – first and most basic – form of normatively inflected mutual recognition. I shall argue that Honneth’s account of love does entail an overly optimistic philosophical anthropology, according to which the parent-infant bond is understood as a blissful – unambivalent – fusion that serves as the paradigm case for Honneth’s normative conception of recognition. I will discuss the implications of Butler’s criticism for the normative, social-theoretical, and meta-normative dimensions of Honneth’s project, and consider how the lack of ambivalence in Honneth’s conceptions of love and recognition is connected to his similarly insufficiently ambivalent discussion of gay marriage in his most recent work. Amy Allen is Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She is co-editor in chief of the journal Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, and editor of the Columbia University Press series New Directions in Critical Theory. Among her many publications are the monographs ‘The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity’, ‘The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory’, and, most recently, ‘The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory’.