Exposing the Ruins of Law: The Rhetorical Contours of Recognition’s Demand

This article examines the rhetorical structure of the demand for recognition in order to refigure the relationship between law and the scene of address in political and theoretical accounts of recognition. It begins by demonstrating that theorists and critics of the politics of recognition assume that law limns the scene of recognition, framing it in a way that contains its practices and marks its end. The difficulty of such a presumption, however, is that, if law is afforded the status of a frame or background, we are unable to account for the rhetorical operations of law—the way it constitutes the norms of recognizability. A reading of the U. K.’s Gender Recognition Act of 2004 provides a brief example of how a demand for recognition might expose law’s rhetorical conditions and demonstrate how legal judgment presupposes a scene of recognition in which both subjects and law take (up a) place.