The paradigm of recognition, developed over a long period by Axel Honneth, is an ambitious formal attempt to think about the genesis of subjective life, both in psychic terms, through the reference to psychoanalysis, and in historical life, with struggles for recognition being understood as the driving force of historical progress. Honethian theory, however, makes limited use of the notion of otherness, at the risk of leading to a normalizing or even standardizing appropriation of psychoanalysis. Faced with this centripetal movement of recognition as a subsumption of otherness, the author introduces, as a counterpoint and opening, Jean Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction as a kind of passage to the limits of the theory of recognition. Caught up in a dialectical movement of mis-re-cognition, it seems that the paradigm of recognition paradoxically rests on its other, namely, that which defeats all recognition.