Desubstantializing the critique of forms of life: relationality, subjectivity, morality

Rahel Jaeggi’s Critique of Forms of Life represents a welcome new development in critical social thought. It aims to overcome the ‘liberal abstinence’, which forbids criticizing the ethical fabric of social life, and proposes to connect normative evaluation with a serious social-ontological model of ‘forms of life’. In this article we argue, however, that Jaeggi’s ontological characterization of the concept of form of life is problematic in ways that introduce a number of adverse consequences for social critique. In section 1, we lay out the main components of Jaeggi’s account. In section 2, we present four interconnected problems that beset Jaeggi’s substantializing conception of forms of life. In section 3, we present an alternative construal of the idea of forms of life, one which does not utilize the concept for grasping substantial unities, but rather focuses on the ‘forms’ that specifically human life takes, and which grasps social practices as concrete collaborative activities involving expectations of recognition. We thereby bring together the recognition-theoretical strand of critical social thought with Jaeggi’s welcome new gambit. In section 4 we briefly put forth three mutually complementary ways to conceive of recognitive expectations immanent in social life understood as a collaborative endeavor.