How does one experience recognition? Sebastian Bandelin's advancement - oriented towards the social philosophy of pragmatism - of a critical theory of recognition, shows that recognition is not to be understood as the confirmation of antecedent claims to identity, but rather as a social process, in the course of which particular practical relations to the self are realized; as realizations, they are led through their social consequences into a crisis, which causes them to be critically reflected upon, before being ultimately overcome. The concept of successful recognition must then be related to how this process of experience, in which existing conceptions of the self and institutionally stabilized forms of action are interrogated and formed anew, can be organized in more meaningful ways.