What has come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail. This is why the need is now acknowledged for the first time. In premodern times, people didn’t speak of “identity” and “recognition”—not because people didn’t have (what we call) identities, or because these didn’t depend on recognition, but rather because these were then too unproblematic to be thematized as such.#