20

Social Invisibility and

Emotional Blindness
James Jardine

I don’t know what white people see when they look at a negro anymore,
but I do know, that – I realized when I was very young – that, whatever
he was looking at, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. It was something he was
afraid of, it was something to which he was attracted, or which he found
repulsive. But it wasn’t me. I was not a man.
James Baldwin1

Introduction
The unsettling, humiliating, and often threatening experience of feeling
oneself invisible before the gazes of other people in one’s social world –
succinctly captured in the above excerpt from a 1960 television interview
with the African-American novelist and essayist James Baldwin, but still
today routinely lived by some members of social minorities and other
(historically or contemporarily) oppressed groups – has obvious potential
as a theme for collaborative efforts between social theorists and phenom-
enologists. The present chapter proposes one way of approaching such
a collaborative engagement, drawing in particular upon three authors
who offer detailed analyses of social visibility and its potential patholo-
gies: Axel Honneth, Frantz Fanon, and Edmund Husserl. The specific
phenomenon will first be located by way of Honneth’s account of the
manner in which social invisibility becomes manifest – namely, in behav-
iour that expresses an attitude of nonrecognition towards other persons
immediately present. As we shall see, Honneth ultimately suggests that
the recognitive dimension at issue here – that is, what is conspicuously
absent in invisibilising social interactions – involves patterns of bodily
expression that convey a (positive and context-appropriate) emotive atti-
tude towards the other. Accordingly, his account implies that affect plays
an essential role in enabling us to see others in an affirmative or recogni-
tive (rather than merely cognitive) fashion, such that it is the presence
of certain affirmative emotional expressions that conveys to others their
social (rather than merely literal) visibility. While this emphasis on the
affective preconditions of social visibility strikes me as promising, in the
 Social Invisibility 309
second part of the chapter it will be suggested that Honneth’s account of
social invisibility is limited by its sole focus only on those cases where a
mere lack of emotional responsiveness to others is present. For, as think-
ers such as Fanon and Baldwin emphasise, one’s invisibility before others
becomes manifest primarily in those cases where one witnesses the emer-
gence of actual (dehumanizing) emotional responses to one’s perceptual
presence.
While the essential relationships holding between perception, valu-
ing, and emotion remain largely unexplored in the work of Honneth
and Fanon, the third part of the chapter will consider these relationships
phenomenologically by drawing upon Husserl’s unpublished writings on
affect and social experience. As Husserl’s fine-grained analyses show, our
emotive responses to perceptually present others are lived as embodied
and evaluative attitudes which target others in their perceptual presence
and simultaneously as ways in which we see others as having new forms
of (affective and axiological) significance. Moreover, I will suggest that
the form of nonrecognition involved with social invisibility can be under-
stood as a specific and accentuated manifestation of a broader danger
implicit within affective life that I will term emotional blindness. My
account of this phenomenon draws upon Husserl’s discussion of what
he terms ‘blind’ or ‘inauthentic’ emotional responses: that is, cases of
affective intentionality that evaluatively construe their intentional object
in a fashion that is responsive more to certain preconceptions or asso-
ciative horizons than to the matter concerned as it actually documents
itself in experience. More exactly, it will be suggested that the inhuman
gaze which provokes a sense of social invisibility typically manifests an
instance of emotive response (be it fear, disgust, or sheer indifference)
that is ‘blind’ in this sense. In other words, I will argue that the manner
of looking that conveys to others their social invisibility – or what could
be termed an ‘invisibilising gaze’ – is infused with affective construals
that, while sometimes partially co-responsive to social perception and
understanding, are contaminated by associative configurations that lead
the gazing person’s feelings astray.

I. Social Visibility and Invisibility

Honneth’s examination of the phenomenon of social invisibility occupies
a key function within his broader attempt to establish and motivate a
systematic ‘recognition theory’: that is, a reinvigorated form of critical
social theory that is sufficiently responsive to the psychological, norma-
tive, and political significance of mutual recognition between persons.
In this broader philosophical framework, Honneth proposes three basic
varieties of social recognition or acknowledgement (Anerkennung) – love
and emotional support within intimate personal relationships, respect for
each individual’s basic dignity as enshrined in reciprocally accepted legal
310 James Jardine
rights, and shapes of social esteem or solidarity that are capable of valu-
ing a diversity of specific identities and attributes (rather than privileging
the self-understanding of dominant groups) – before arguing that partici-
pating in a nexus of social relationships that embody these three forms of
recognition is a necessary precondition for identity-formation and social
freedom. Moreover, Honneth contends that it is not only in their presence
that such relationships of recognition affect human life but also in their
felt absence. That is, socialised human persons possess a repertoire of
‘moral expectations’ delineating the kind of recognition they expect from
others; and if their actually experienced social relationships frustrate
their recognitional expectations, they will often desire, and feel inclined
to (individually or collectively) demand, the transformation of those rela-
tionships. The task of Honneth’s recognition theory is then to develop a
more general account of the role played by mutual recognition in par-
tially constituting autonomous and fully satisfying human agency but at
the same time to gear this theoretical framework towards the thematic
elaboration of a number of far-reaching dissatisfactions with historically
constituted ‘recognition orders’ – including grievances that have not yet
been given explicit political articulation. By means of such elaboration,
Honneth’s recognition theory ultimately aims to contribute to the critical
development of various political demands, particularly as advanced by
progressive social movements seeking to challenge and transform facets
of the prevailing social order (which Honneth thematises as ‘struggles
for recognition’).2 Since he takes the phenomenon of social invisibility
to involve the denial of ‘an “elementary” form of recognition’ (Honneth
2001: 115) – ‘elementary’ primarily because its absence or presence is,
as we shall see, already exhibited at the pre-discursive level of immediate
and involuntary bodily expression3 – the task of providing a compel-
ling account of this phenomenon is clearly of urgent importance for his
broader critical-theoretical project.
In order to convey a preliminary sense of the opposed phenomena
which his analysis of invisibility seeks to clarify, Honneth gives an initial
priority to first-person descriptions of one’s own sense of social visibility
or invisibility, a choice that is presumably based upon his belief that these
two social conditions leave a deep impression on the persons they afflict –
with one’s own social invisibility being something lived through in a par-
ticularly visceral manner. Accordingly, he writes that to be socially visible
involves living in a social world in which one’s ‘interactive relationships’
with others permit a stable sense that one is ‘affirmed’ or accorded ‘social
validity’ with respect to the ‘role of a specific social type’ (2001: 119).
This can be helpfully contrasted with the experience of one’s own social
invisibility, which Honneth describes as ‘non-existence in a social sense’
(2001: 111). The socially invisible person repeatedly suffers the humili-
ating experience of encountering others who fail to offer any visible
acknowledgement that she or he is someone enacting a specific social
 Social Invisibility 311
role, or even that that she or he is a human subject tout court (2001:
114). Honneth’s prime example of such invisibility is the first-person nar-
rator of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man: an African-American man
who feels himself rendered ‘invisible’ by the near-constant and ritualized
manner in which white Americans ‘look through’ and actively and pub-
licly fail to ‘see’ him as a person. Referring to the distinction between
love, respect, and solidarity as three forms of recognition analysed in his
more systematic works, Honneth suggests that social invisibility in this
sense represents a primitive form of disrespect, inasmuch as it involves
a peculiar kind of nonrecognition that refuses to acknowledge the basic
humanity of the other person (2001: 123). However, this mode of disre-
spect clearly differs from more overt forms of disrespect or dehumani-
zation, in that it does not involve the active denial or deprivation of a
person’s basic rights (cf. Honneth 1995: 107–121, 133–134). Honneth’s
task in his analysis of invisibility is therefore to elucidate what is involved
with the specific form of disrespect that generates, in the person disre-
spected, such a sense of non-visibility.
In setting out to achieve this task, Honneth first emphasizes that, at
least when contrasted with a more strict notion of invisibility – that
would characterize only those entities that entirely lack any visual pres-
ence and availability for perceptual judgement – the kind of non-visibility
to others reported by the narrator of Invisible Man must be understood
as involving invisibility in a somewhat ‘metaphorical’ or ‘figurative’ sense
(2001: 111–112). Experiencing one’s own social invisibility before others
is not a matter of taking oneself to be wholly invisible to another person
in a more literal sense, since it does not entail being completely absent
from the other’s visual field. Correlatively, Honneth draws a distinction
between ‘literal visibility’ and ‘figurative’ or ‘social visibility’ and aims
to clarify what is absent in cases of social invisibility by investigating
what more is required, in addition to mere literal perceptibility, for the
emergence of social visibility in the context of an interpersonal encounter
(2001: 111).
Importantly, Honneth claims that the additional recognitive ingredi-
ent required for social (rather than literal) visibility will not typically be
a particular kind of speech act, one that would perhaps verbally affirm
the other person’s visible presence or social validity. Rather, it is often
through non-linguistic forms of bodily expressivity – as enhancing or
entirely replacing speech acts – that others impress upon us our visibility
or invisibility in a social sense, since social statuses of this kind can be
conveyed without any linguistic communication being necessary (2001:
119). Accordingly, Honneth suggests that paradigmatic instances of
social invisibility involve interactions where one person fails to exhibit,
before another, certain context-appropriate bodily gestures and facial
expressions; and that the absence of such behaviour is significant for
our sense of social visibility because it serves to express, not merely a
312 James Jardine
perceptual grasp of our spatial presence, but a certain kind of evaluative
affirmation that we ordinarily expect from other people in a given social
context. Honneth offers the following examples of such non-linguistic
expressive gestures:

Even adult persons usually make clear reciprocally in their communi-

cations, through a multitude of finely nuanced, expressive responses,
that the other is welcome or deserves special attention: a friend at a
party is worthy of a sparkling smile or a strongly articulated welcom-
ing gesture, the cleaning lady in one’s apartment is offered a gesture
hinting at gratitude that extends beyond the speech act of greeting,
and the black person is greeted like all other persons in the train com-
partment with changing facial expressions or a quick nod of the head.
(Honneth 2001: 119)

In Honneth’s discussion of such recognitive gestures, a number of intrigu-

ing claims emerge, although for the current purposes it will suffice to
focus on just two. On the one hand, Honneth argues that such bodily
movements can be described as a kind of ‘meta-action’ (2001: 120–121),
in the sense that they make it clear to the other person that their agent
is willing to act in a particular type of way towards them in the future,
hence allowing the other to form an expectation of the kind of treatment
she will be in for as the encounter unfolds. Thus, as Honneth puts it, ‘a
welcoming gesture among adults expresses the fact that one can subse-
quently reckon upon benevolent actions’, while ‘the absence of gestures
of recognition’ suggests, in the space of the encounter, that the other
‘must be prepared for hostile actions’ (2001: 120). A powerful illustra-
tion of someone’s behaviour non-linguistically expressing a total absence
of human recognition towards certain others – and thereby provoking a
pronounced sense of insecurity in them – can be found in a passage from
Audre Lorde’s semi-autobiographical novel Zami: A New Spelling of My
Name. Here, the narrator recollects the anxiety that the cold and hostile
gaze of a museum guard generated in her Grenadian mother:

She did not know her way in and out of the galleries of the Museum
of National History, but she did know that it was a good place to
take children if you wanted them to grow up smart. It frightened her
when she took the children there, and she would pinch each one of
us girls on the fleshy part of our upper arms at one time or another
all afternoon. Supposedly, it was because we wouldn’t behave, but it
was actually because beneath the neat visor of the museum guard’s
hat, she could see pale blue eyes staring at her and her children as if
we were a bad smell, and this frightened her. This was a situation she
couldn’t control.
(Lorde 2018: 10)
 Social Invisibility 313
On the other hand, Honneth seems aware that, in noting that recognitive
gestures serve to convey their agent’s willingness to act in a certain kind
of way towards the other in the future, we have not yet fully accounted
for the temptation to describe such gestures as giving expression to the
other’s visibility. Of course, one could always seek to dismiss the impli-
cation that such gestures betray anything significant about their agent’s
way of perceiving the other person concerned, an implication which may
after all simply be generated by a loose and entirely metaphorical usage
of the terms visibility and invisibility in relation to such gestures. But
this is not the path that Honneth pursues. Rather, he ultimately argues
that regarding the kind of recognition at issue here as involving visibility
in a wholly metaphorical sense is an untenable solution; and that what
is required, at least for the sphere of interpersonal relations, is rather a
broadening of our conception of visibility such that it necessarily requires
recognitional, as well as merely sensuous and cognitive, aspects (2001:
125). More specifically, he suggests that the kind of recognition that the
gestures discussed here serve to express should be understood as a kind
of ‘evaluative perception’, in which the worth or value (Wert) of the other
person is ‘directly given’ (2001: 124–126).
Honneth draws upon a number of philosophical and empirical
resources in support of his proposal that elementary recognition involves
a crucial dimension of evaluative perception, but for the present purposes
it will suffice to indicate two central motivations for such a claim. First,
while such recognitive gestures as sparkling smiles and welcoming nods
convey a normative significance that is embedded within ‘the evaluative
vocabulary’ of a ‘social world’ (2001: 125) – and in this sense involve a
kind of appraisal of the other person’s value or worth, one that further
implies a practical willingness to treat the other in a certain fashion as the
encounter unfolds – it is nevertheless the case that the recognizing subject
does not ordinarily live through an episode of deliberation in which an
evaluative judgement is formed on the basis of justifying reasons. Indeed,
if such an episode of deliberation were to occur prior to the extension of
a recognitive gesture, the person to whom this gesture was extended may
well be left with a somewhat uneasy and insecure sense of her or his own
social visibility. The attitude of evaluative appraisal conveyed by the rec-
ognitive gesture therefore appears to be one of a ‘direct’ or ‘immediate’
variety (2001: 125), and conceiving of this attitude as an act of percep-
tion therefore looks, at first glance, more phenomenologically plausible
than understanding it as an intellectively-formed value-judgement.
In later sections of the paper, it will be suggested that a more detailed
phenomenological analysis of the experience of the recognizing subject
can allow for a further development of this line of thought. But let me now
mention a second motivation for Honneth’s suggestion that elementary
recognition constitutes a form of evaluative perception, one that draws
more upon the perspective of a subject who is deprived such recognition.
314 James Jardine
As Honneth writes, for ‘the affected persons in particular, their “invis-
ibility” has in each case a real core: they actually feel themselves not to
be perceived. However, “perception” must mean more here than it does
in the concept of seeing, that is, of identifying and cognizing someone or
something’ (2001: 113). This thought can be spelled out by reconsidering
Lorde’s depiction of a mother who is frightened by the museum guard’s
‘pale blue eyes staring at her and her children as if we were a bad smell’.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, to paraphrase Baldwin, for
those who become the target of a gaze of this sort, whatever it is the gazer
is seeing, it isn’t them. That is, the guard’s way of looking is so intimately
bound up – at least for the persons to whom the stare is directed – with
a construal of the mother and children as base or repulsive, that it seems
plausible to stipulate that, from the mother’s point of view, the guard’s
attitude appears to render him unable to see, in a quite literal sense, what
(or who) is there before him.
Let me now briefly take stock of some of the central Honnethian
claims regarding social visibility and invisibility highlighted so far. For
Honneth, our sense of our own social visibility is something vulnerable to
the expressive significance manifest in the gestures and facial expressions
of the other people with whom we interact in concrete social situations.
More precisely, this social visibility is threatened or undermined, leading
to the distressing condition of social invisibility, in the absence of gestures
on behalf of others that serve to convey, not merely our own perceptibil-
ity in a literal or sensory guise, but also that we have been noticed by oth-
ers in a more affirmative or evaluative sense. Part of what this means is
that such recognitive gestures indicate a motivational willingness to treat
others in what Honneth describes as a broadly respectful or benevolent
fashion, with the fine-grained practical (or meta-practical) significance
of such gestures being dependent upon the specific interpersonal context
and the type of gesture extended. But they also serve to convey a particu-
lar kind of evaluative stance on behalf of the recognizing person, a stance
which is not typically a matter of predicative judgement but which rather
shares the immediacy and receptivity of perceptual experience.

II. Social Invisibility and Affect

While I take Honneth’s essay on invisibility to offer a number of interest-
ing and potentially insightful claims concerning the phenomenology of
social visibility and invisibility, it strikes me that one of the most intrigu-
ing suggestions that emerges in his discussion is one that he does not
explicitly develop in this text. Namely, at one point Honneth suggests
that recognitive gestures serve to convey a certain kind of affirmative
evaluation of the persons to which they are extended, at least in part
because they are typically experienced as expressive of a certain kind
of emotional stance, one which is held by the recognizing subject and
 Social Invisibility 315
directed towards the other person. As Honneth writes: ‘Whether some-
one smiles lovingly or merely greets one respectfully, whether someone
extends his hand emphatically or merely nods his head in a benevolent
way, in each case a different type of emotional readiness to engage morally
with the addressee is signalled with the expressive gesture’ (2001: 122,
emphasis mine). While Honneth does not really expand on this remark,
one way of understanding it would be to surmise that what the recogni-
tive gesture most directly expresses is an affective evaluation of the other
of one or another form; and that this emotional stance is furthermore
immediately intelligible to the person recognized as having motivational
consequences – namely, as eliciting in the recognizing subject a desire to
treat them in a fashion that is morally delimited by the positive evalua-
tion contained within the interpersonal emotion in question.
In the next section, I will argue that phenomenological analysis of affec-
tive experience lends support to the thought that our emotional responses
to others contribute an evaluative component to perceptual experience,
and that this can help clarify Honneth’s suggestion that affect plays a
crucial role for sustaining a sense of social visibility in concrete social
interactions. But it will first be necessary to consider the implications of
this suggestion for our understanding of the central phenomenon under
consideration here –namely, social invisibility. Now, a peculiar lacunae of
Honneth’s article is that – despite his detailed analysis of what is involved
with the gestures and attitudes required for social visibility – the kind of
behaviour that portrays others as socially invisible is described in merely
negative terms – namely, as involving the simple ‘absence’ of recognitive
gestures (cf. 2001: 115–116, 119–120, 123). Yet if we attempt to take
seriously (and further elaborate) Honneth’s suggestion that social visibil-
ity is conveyed through emotionally saturated bodily expressions, then
the possibility emerges that invisibilising activity involves some kind of
‘deformation’ of a person’s affective sensibility as regards (certain) others
(cf. Honneth 2001: 126).
While Honneth does not concretely spell out what such a deforma-
tion of affective perception might involve – or indicate, in positive terms,
how this affective deformation could become salient (as denying visibil-
ity) in the context of an interpersonal encounter – Danielle Petherbridge
(2017) has recently offered a crucial supplement to Honneth’s account
that sheds light on just this issue. So as to offer a more detailed and con-
crete analysis of social invisibility, Petherbridge draws upon an expansive
body of writings that address and articulate the lived experience of being
perceived in a racialising manner. In such cases of invisibilising percep-
tion, the perceiver conveys through their embodied gestures and move-
ments to the person perceived that they are seen as racially other – that is,
as instantiating a racial identity constructed and sedimented in the social
imaginary of a dominant group (with which the perceiver themselves will
typically identify). Moreover, as authors such as Ellison (2001) – but also
316 James Jardine
Fanon (2008), Toni Morrison (2007), Alia Al-Saji (2014), and George
Yancy (2017) – have illustrated, the invisibilising force of various racialis-
ing perceptual habits is paradoxically intertwined with their tendency to
impress upon the othered group a highly accentuated form of essentialis-
ing visibility, such that racialising social encounters are often character-
ised by a dialectic of invisibility and hypervisibility (Petherbridge 2017:
106–110).
Building upon Petherbridge’s rich and rewarding discussion, I would
now like to explore one aspect of the invisibilising gaze that, by my esti-
mation, Petherbridge underemphasises – namely, that racialising percep-
tual comportment often involves forms of bodily expressivity that, rather
than intimating a total absence of emotional responsiveness, actively con-
vey specific (though distorted and alienating) emotional responses to the
racialised person. For instance, in Fanon’s famous account of realising
that his being-for-others was unrecognizably distorted – through the vari-
ous racist interpretations permeating his embodied presence in colonial
French society – a pivotal role is played by the evident fear and aversion
that his bodily appearance elicited in white French people (Fanon 2008:
89–101; cf. Young 2011: 122–148). At least in this case, the invisibilising
behaviour does not betray a total absence of emotive expressiveness, but
rather intimates an affective evaluation of the other person that actively
construes her or him as base, threatening, or repulsive. Accordingly, the
affective state of the person gazing is not merely inhibited by – but consti-
tutes and projects – a culturally sedimented and racialising interpretation
of the other person. While this emotive attitude is, in a sense, crudely
elicited by the perceived person’s bodily appearance, it also further con-
figures her or his bodily presence to the perceiving subject, through the
functioning of certain culturally sedimented emotive habits (cf. Al-Saji
2014: 140–141; Yancy 2017: 17–44). To adopt Fanon’s fruitful techni-
cal vocabulary, my suggestion here is thus that such emotive habits play
a positive and constitutive role in imposing, upon the racialised subject’s
lived body, a ‘historical-racial schema’ (2008: 91). Seen from a broader
perspective, the (sociocultural) formation of such habits within individ-
ual persons serves to disseminate and reproduce societal patterns of non-
recognition and invisibility, patterns that are lived through viscerally by
the persons who are thus racialized in the respective social nexus.

III. Husserl on Emotional Blindness and the

Phenomenology of Affective Experience
In the previous section, it was suggested that, in a number of cases,
invisibilising modes of behaviour – as well as visibility-enabling recogni-
tive gestures – possess a (non)recognitional significance, at least in part
because they give expression to certain affective states. In the remainder
of this chapter, I would like to focus on just two issues raised by this
 Social Invisibility 317
thought. First, an obvious question to be raised here is whether emotions
can indeed be regarded as playing the role that I, following Honneth
and Fanon, have suggested we might ascribe to them. That is, the ques-
tion here is whether emotions can really function as immediate, non-
deliberative, and even quasi-perceptual interpersonal evaluative stances;
stances that are both intentionally oriented towards other people in our
current perceptual field, as well as being ways in which we experience
those others as having a certain kind of value or axiological significance.
Moreover, if it is granted that emotions can function in this way, then
a further salient issue emerges – namely, that of the different personal
and social circumstances that account for why we sometimes emotively
recognise others, while sometimes denying them recognitive visibility. In
this dual assessment of the plausibility and explanatory implications of
the suggestion that an elementary form of recognition can be located in
certain kinds of interpersonal affect, I will now turn to Edmund Husserl’s
work on the phenomenology of emotion. While the emotions cannot be
regarded as a major theme in Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy,
detailed analyses of emotional experience, and its relationship to value
and valuing, can be found in Logical Investigations and Ideas I, as well
as in his research manuscripts and lectures. Rather than offering here a
detailed overview of the issues and problems addressed by Husserl in
those writings (cf. Drummond 1995, 2006; Melle 2012; Jardine 2020b),
my aim will rather be to indicate certain claims that I find particularly
insightful and salient for the concerns of this chapter.
Husserl’s writings on affective experience seek to investigate whether,
and in what sense, a person’s emotional state might constitute a distinc-
tive form of evaluative attitude, one that is typically directed towards and
targets worldly matters – including other people in the subject’s immedi-
ate perceptual environment. Furthermore, like the kind of evaluation that
Honneth finds implied in the significance of recognitive gestures, Husserl
argues that emotive valuing enacts a peculiar kind of subjective activity
that needn’t involve – but rather offers an important starting point for –
evaluative thinking. But this emphasis on the non-intellective character
of emotional valuation does not imply that such experience is devoid of
all intentionality or intelligibility. Rather, our emotive responses involve a
pre-theoretical experience of things, people, or worldly contexts as valu-
able (or disvaluable), an experience that is phenomenologically akin to
sense-perception but that also introduces novel forms of (felt) evaluative
significance that do not emerge at the level of perceptual experience in
the strictest and most literal sense (Jardine 2020b). For Husserl, then, the
commonplace intuition that emotions are frequently intentional states –
that is, states of mind that relate to matters external to the emotion itself,
and which also construe those matters in a particular way – is a thought
that gains considerable support and confirmation from phenomenologi-
cal analysis. Moreover, his phenomenological studies of emotional life
318 James Jardine
can be regarded as significantly clarifying and deepening this thought,
to the extent that they claim to unearth and investigate an evaluative
mode of perception that, they argue, is both constitutive of and unique
to emotional experience. As Husserl summarizes one of the key findings
from his research manuscripts: ‘When I am angry, when I am passion-
ately agitated by the loathsomeness of a person’s way of acting, then the
seeing of that person’s loathsomeness resides precisely in the affective agi-
tations themselves, and in the ray of attentiveness (turning-towards-the-
person) that passes through such agitations’ (Husserl 2020: 128, transl.
and emphasis mine).
While I am unable to comprehensively illustrate this here, I take it that
Husserl’s explorations of the evaluative content of emotional states, and
of their complex intertwinement with perception – including the percep-
tion of other people, a theme with which Husserl was much occupied
and which also emerges in his writings on the emotions (Jardine 2020a) –
have much to contribute to our understanding of social visibility and rec-
ognitive modes of affect and perception. For instance, beyond illustrating
that, and how, the emotions introduce a (complex and internally differen-
tiated) evaluative component into our direct experience of other people,
Husserl’s analyses also explore the role embodiment plays in emotive
valuing. Ultimately, he suggests that a number of lived bodily processes
and activities experientially contribute to our affective evaluations, in
that they transform and enrich the evaluative significance that the mat-
ter emoted has for us (Jardine 2020b). Accordingly, it seems to me that
Husserl’s writings can be of significant import in further clarifying the
relationships that hold between embodied gestures of recognition, emo-
tive valuing, and perception.
Moreover, Husserl’s work also sheds light on some of the back-
ground conditions that enable the emergence of socially visibilising – as
well as socially invisibilising – modes of behaviour in concrete social
interactions. Particularly relevant here is Husserl’s distinction between
‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’ in the emotive sphere, or to employ
terminology that Husserl occasionally uses, between feelings that dis-
close value intuitively (Wertanschauungen) and a certain kind of blind-
ness that can afflict our emotions (blinde Gefühle, blinde Affekte).4 To
illustrate this distinction, we can consider two different examples of
interpersonal affect that Husserl himself discusses. As an example of
authentic (or value-disclosive) feelings, consider the case of speaking
with a person to whom one already has a profound affective attachment
and feeling uplifted by joy as one witnesses their familiar and beloved
personality become manifest in their spoken words, tone of voice, and
distinctive facial expressions. In this case, we can say that our feelings of
affection for the other person – and joy at being in their presence – find
a certain kind of fulfilment in what is currently perceptually given to us:
here, what we like about this person is not merely taken for granted or
 Social Invisibility 319
anticipated, but rather given to us in the other’s bodily comportment
(Husserl 2020: 102–103, 113–114).
This can be contrasted with modes of affective valuing that are inau-
thentic or blind in the sense that they assume an underlying interpreta-
tion of their intentional object that lacks any grounding in our experience
of the concrete matter in question. Rather than finding experiential fulfil-
ment, such feelings rather rest upon an implicit belief or preconception
that relates their concrete objects to others with which it is passively
associated, as putatively belonging to the same generic kind. One exam-
ple offered by Husserl of feelings that are blind or inauthentic in this
sense is a situation where one dislikes someone simply because she shares
a name with a particularly unappealing fictional character. As Husserl
writes, ‘What can poor Eulalie do to change that I once read a novel,
in which a monstrous woman was called Eulalie?’ (1988: 410, transl.
mine; cited in Loidolt 2009: 173). As this example illustrates, while our
emotional responses to other people may be lived through as offering an
intuitive sense of their value or disvalue, there may well be presumptu-
ous associative apperceptions or intentional elaborations at play in this
emotive valuation that lack any grounding in actual familiarity with the
specific person concerned (cf. Husserl 1989: 286; Merleau-Ponty 2012:
379). These inauthentic elements of our emotive reaction to the person
will draw upon a general and typifying affective sense of other people,
one that may be fed by fictional and historical narratives, as well as rein-
forced by certain emotionally salient and socially propagated images.
While Husserl more often describes emotional attitudes that are par-
ticularly determined by such associative prefiguring as ‘inauthentic’ or
‘inadequate’, he occasionally describes them as blind modes of affective
intentionality (2020: 112–113, 452–453). Emotions are characterised by
blindness in this sense, when they project a (pre-predicative) appraisal
of an intentional object that is motivated, not by what the object has
actually shown itself experientially to be, but rather by a sense of the
object that is passively configured through its association with other (real
or imaginary) objects familiar to the emoting person.5 In applying this
vocabulary to the problematic of social visibility, it seems to me inevi-
table to concede that not only much invisibilising and alienating social
behaviour (such as racialising forms of aversion) but also many cases of
positive recognitive response (such as friendliness towards strangers) are
characterised by a degree of emotive inauthenticity (or blindness) in this
Husserlian sense. However, it seems to me promising to further develop
Husserl’s conceptual distinctions by proposing that racialising modes
of affective perception are characterised by a specific and accentuated
form of emotional blindness, insofar as they involve a style of affective
articulation of the other’s perceptual givenness – as sustained through
a set of culturally sedimented emotive habits – that essentially distorts
the other’s embodied presence, through affectively associating it with
320 James Jardine
various demeaning (and in some cases animalising) myths and images.
Accordingly, Husserl’s analyses of emotive inauthenticity – as well as his
reflections on its habitual-motivational and social circumstances and on
the modes of engagement through which we can relinquish our emo-
tive prejudices – may significantly contribute to our understanding of the
functioning and genesis of invisibilising perceptual and emotive habits
and of effective strategies for interrupting them (cf. Al-Saji 2014).

Conclusion
In the first and second parts of this chapter, it was suggested that a per-
son’s sense of her own social visibility is something that can be under-
mined when other people’s non-linguistic bodily expressions repeatedly
convey to her that, while she is in some sense present in the other’s visual
field, she has not been noticed in an emotionally affirmative fashion.
As we saw in the second part of this chapter, this claim can be further
developed by appealing to authors such as Fanon, who emphasise that
particular kinds of emotive reaction project an image of the embodied
self that is distorted by various racist and racialising preconceptions,
images, and stories. In the third part, we saw that Husserl’s work on
the emotions can lend a degree of phenomenological credence to the
thought that emotions can function as a kind of immediate evaluation
of other people that are perceptually present to us, an evaluation that
allows us to directly experience such others as having evaluative signifi-
cance. Husserl’s analyses, then, serve to further solidify Honneth’s intui-
tion that loving smiles and respectful nods of the head convey a kind of
immediate and affective valuation of us, in our perceptual presence to
others. Finally, it was suggested that developing a Husserlian concept of
emotional blindness may be of aid in clarifying the conditions for the
emergence of the kind of deformed emotional response generative of
social invisibility.

Notes
1. These lines are an excerpt from an interview conducted by Nathan Cohen, on
Encounter, CBC-TV, December 11, 1960. In addition, Baldwin (1964) offers a
seminal discussion of the role played by socio-historical contexts in racialising
and invisibilising forms of perception and affect.
2. For an early and systematic presentation of this model, see Honneth (1995).
Particularly important refinements of the account can be found in Honneth
(2003, 2014). In addition, see the particularly helpful and illuminating pres-
entations of Honneth’s broader project in Petherbridge (2013), Zurn (2015),
and Kauppinen (2002, 2011).
3. The conception of ‘elementary recognition’ found in Honneth’s writings on
invisibility is introduced in order to demarcate any form of recognition, inso-
far as it becomes manifest at the level pre-discursive and pre-reflective embod-
ied engagement (2001: 115, 119–120). Accordingly, it differs subtly from the
 Social Invisibility 321
more restricted concept of elementary (or ‘existential’) recognition discussed
in Honneth’s lectures on reification, which is explicitly distinguished from
love, respect, and solidarity, and understood as a separate and distinct form of
recognition (Honneth 2008: 152–153; cf. Jardine 2015, 2017).
4. Husserl mainly develops this distinction in manuscripts and lectures dating
(roughly) from the first decade of the 20th century, this being the period in
which he was most occupied with the phenomenology of the emotions (cf.
Husserl 1988: 343–344, 408–411, 2020: 22–24, 112–113, 271, 450–453).
However, this language also reappears in his later writings on affect (cf. 2004:
223, 2014: 282, 286–289, 2020: 510).
5. One important complication in this regard is Husserl’s distinction between
‘affective apperceptions’ or ‘apperceptions of value’ (Gefühlsapperzeptionen,
Wertapperzeptionen) on the one hand, and ‘reactive emotions’ or ‘affects’
(reactive Gefühle, Affekte) on the other, these being two distinct kinds of
affective intentionality (or ‘intentional feeling’). While affective apperceptions
are more intimately united with sensibility and are at play whenever a per-
ceptual object passively affects as (aesthetically) pleasing or displeasing, the
higher-order emotional reactions are more active and spontaneous achieve-
ments, involving a form of ‘emotive position-taking’. While the affective
apperceptions are already passively motivated by the object as (ap)perceived,
the reactive emotions have a more complex normative structure, and exhibit
a greater responsiveness to the habituated convictions and evaluations of the
emoting person (cf. Jardine 2020b). I take that it is this latter mode of affec-
tive intentionality that is of most significance for our recognitive responses to
others, not only because the most (personally and interpersonally) significant
forms of evaluation reside here, and because they have a more richly embod-
ied dimension and are thus in many cases more perceptually salient to oth-
ers, but also because such reactions imply a far richer horizon of motivating
assumptions, and are accordingly more vulnerable to inauthenticity or blind-
ness. However, it is equally important to emphasise that such emotive reac-
tions are, on Husserl’s account, typically motivationally conditioned by the
value-apperceptions that comprise the more passive stratum of affective life,
and a comprehensive phenomenological account of emotive (in)authenticity
must accordingly consider both dimensions.

Reference List
Al-Saji, A. 2014. A phenomenology of hesitation: Interrupting racializing habits
of seeing. In E.S. Lee (ed.) Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and
Race. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 167–192.
Baldwin, J. 1964. Stranger in the village. In J. Baldwin (ed.) Notes of a Native
Son. London: Michael Joseph, 151–165.
Drummond, J.J. 1995. Moral objectivity: Husserl’s sentiments of the understand-
ing. Husserl Studies, 12 (2): 165–183.
Drummond, J.J. 2006. Respect as a moral emotion: A phenomenological
approach. Husserl Studies, 22: 1–27.
Ellison, R. 2001. Invisible Man. London: Penguin Books.
Fanon, F. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. R. Philcox (trans.). New York: Grove
Press.
Honneth, A. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition. J. Anderson (trans.). Cam-
bridge: Polity Press.
322 James Jardine
Honneth, A. 2001. I—Axel Honneth: Invisibility: On the epistemology of ‘recog-
nition.’ Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 75 (1): 111–126.
Honneth, A. 2003. Redistribution as recognition: A response to Nancy Fraser. In
Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (eds.) Redistribution or Recognition? A Polit-
ical-Philosophical Exchange. London and New York: Verso, 110–197.
Honneth, A. 2008. Reification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Honneth, A. 2014. Freedom’s Right. New York: Columbia University Press.
Husserl, E. 1988. Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre. 1908–1914. Ullrich
Melle (ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Husserl, E. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenom-
enological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Con-
stitution. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers.
Husserl, E. 2004. Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester
1920/1924. Henning Peucker (ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Husserl, E. 2014. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbe-
wusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachless
(1908–1937). Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr (eds.). Dordrecht: Springer.
Husserl, E. 2020. Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Band II: Gefühl und
Wert. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Ullrich Melle and Thomas Vongehr (eds.).
Dordrecht: Springer.
Jardine, J. 2015. Stein and Honneth on empathy and emotional recognition.
Human Studies, 38 (4): 567–589.
Jardine, J. 2017. Elementary recognition and empathy: A Husserlian account.
Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 5 (1):
143–170.
Jardine, J. 2020a. Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person. Cham: Springer.
Jardine, J. 2020b. Edmund Husserl. In T. Szanto and H. Landweer (eds.) The
Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion. London and New York:
Routledge.
Kauppinen, A. 2002. Reason, recognition, and internal critique. Inquiry: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 45 (4): 479–498.
Kauppinen, A. 2011. The social dimension of autonomy. In D. Petherbridge (ed.)
Axel Honneth: Critical Essays. Leiden: Brill, 255–302.
Loidolt, S. 2009. Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theories des rechtlichen
Denkens im Anschluss an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. Dordrecht:
Springer.
Lorde, A. 2018. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. A Biomythography. Lon-
don: Penguin Books.
Melle, U. 2012. Husserls deskriptive Erforschung der Gefühlserlebnisse. In R.
Breeur and U. Melle (eds.) Life, Subjectivity & Art: Essays in Honor of Rudolf
Bernet. Dordrecht: Springer.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Donald A. Landes
(trans.). London and New York: Routledge.
Morrison, T. 2007. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage Books.
Petherbridge, D. 2013. The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth. Lanham: Lexington.
Petherbridge, D. 2017. Racializing perception and the phenomenology of
invisibility. In D. Petherbridge and L. Dolezal (eds.) Body/Self/Other: The
 Social Invisibility 323
Phenomenology of Social Encounters. Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 103–129.
Yancy, G. 2017. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race
in America, 2nd ed. Lanham and London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Young, I.M. 2011. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press.
Zurn, C.F. 2015. Axel Honneth: A Critical Theory of the Social. Cambridge and
Malden: Polity Press.