Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jurgen Habermas' Critical Theory (Studies in Philosophy)

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Studies in Philosophy

Edited by

Robert Bernasconi University of Memphis

A Routledge Series

Studies in Philosophy Robert Bernasconi, General Editor Frege and the Logic of Sense and Reference Kevin C. Klement Topics in the Philosophy of Possible Worlds Daniel Patrick Nolan Understanding the Many Byeong-uk Yi Anthropic Bias Observation Selection Effects Nick Bostrom The Beautiful Shape of the Good Platonic and Pythagorean Themes in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment Mihaela C. Fistioc Mathematics in Kant’s Critical Philosophy Reflections on Mathematical Practice Lisa Shabel Referential Opacity and Modal Logic Dagfinn Føllesdal Emmanuel Levinas Ethics, Justice, and the Human beyond Being Elisabeth Louise Thomas The Constitution of Consciousness A Study in Analytic Phenomenology Wolfgang Huemer

The German GĪTĀ Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 Bradley L. Herling Hegel’s Critique of Essence A Reading of the Wesenslogik Franco Cirulli Time, Space and Ethics in the Philosophy of Watsuji Tetsuro, Kuki Shuzo, and Martin Heidegger Graham Mayeda Wittgenstein’s Novels Martin Klebes Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s NOTES TO LITERATURE Ulrich Plass Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species Mary Efrosini Gregory The Rights of Woman as Chimera The Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft Natalie Fuehrer Taylor The German “Mittleweg” Garden Theory and Philosophy in the Time of Kant Michael G. Lee

Dialectics of the Body Corporeality in the Philosophy of T.W. Adorno Lisa Yun Lee

The Immanent Word The Turn to Language in German Philosophy, 1759–1801 Katie Terezakis

Art as Abstract Machine Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari Stephen Zepke

Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory Kenneth G. MacKendrick

Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory

Kenneth G. MacKendrick

Routledge New York & London

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© 2008 by Kenneth G. MacKendrick Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑95617‑8 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data MacKendrick, Kenneth G. Discourse, desire, and fantasy in Jürgen Habermas’ critical theory / by Kenneth G. MacKendrick. p. cm. ‑‑ (Studies in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0‑415‑95617‑X 1. Habermas, Jürgen. 2. Critical theory. I. Title. B3258.H324M28 2007 193‑‑dc22

2007015227

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This book is dedicated to Andrea Brown, for saying the things that no one else was thinking.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter One The Project of Critical Theory: An Introduction to the Thought of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse

11

Chapter Two Knowledge, Interests, Nature: Jürgen Habermas’ Early Writings

41

Chapter Three Critical Theory and Hermeneutics

77

Chapter Four Of Reason and Revelation: Toward a Post-Hermeneutic Critical Theory

117

Chapter Five The Struggle for Recognition: Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Jessica Benjamin

147

Chapter Six Critique of Communicative Reason

175

Notes

181

vii

viii

Contents

Bibliography

215

Index

237

Acknowledgments

Funding for my education and research was made possible by the following sources: Catherine and Louis K. MacKendrick, Andrea Brown, Bank of Montreal, University of Toronto, Wilfrid Laurier University, University of Manitoba, University of Toronto Open Doctoral Fellowship(s), Joint Initiative in German and European Studies Fellowship, and Ontario Graduate Scholarship. This manuscript is a revised version of my Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto (2005). It would not exist without Marsha Hewitt, who introduced me to the work of the Frankfurt School and Habermas (as well as Emma Goldman) and persistently encouraged thoughtful critique throughout the entire process. I owe much to Graeme Nicholson for introducing me to Hegel (and Kropotkin), Jim DiCenso, who was always available when I had questions about Lacan, and Lambert Zuidervaart and Marc Lalonde for their valuable feedback. I owe a tremendous debt to professors from the University of Windsor and the University of Toronto whose ideas and teachings have made a memorable impact on my current studies and interests. Thanks to Bruce Alton, George Crowell, Roger Hutchinson, Pamela Milne, Maureen Muldoon, and Katharine Parr. Numerous friends and colleagues have also contributed greatly to my thoughts as they have been expressed here, especially Johannes Wolfart, Christopher Brittain, Darlene Juschka, Bill Arnal, Nicole Goulet, Stella Gaon, and Gary Davis. I would like to single out Johannes and Chris for special mention. Chris has been an inspiring collaborator since we were students in Toronto and introduced me to fiddleheads in Halifax. Johannes provided bicycles when my partner and I first arrived in Winnipeg, and thus introduced us to the city in a most amiable way. Thanks to all of my colleagues in the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba for interfering with my research. Without such interferences, nothing would get done. A special thank you to Dawne McCance ix

x

Acknowledgments

for such a warm welcome to the Department, to the numerous students, undergraduate and graduate, who have enriched my teaching experiences, and to the administrative assistants who have helped keep me on track. My parents have been a constant source of support and inspiration. I don’t remember when my bedtime was as a child, but there was always time for reading. This has made all the difference. I also thank my brother Andrew, whose proficient wit and madness has never ceased to enthuse, and Danielle—Vegas baby, Vegas! Andrea has been with me from the beginning of my studies. It is to her that I extend my deepest thanks, for being present through the duress and difficulties of the entire process, and for seeing the things that I did not and sharing them with me. Finally, thanks to the workers of the Toronto Transit Commission and Winnipeg Transit for public transportation quick enough to safely arrive on time and slow enough for me to get my reading done.

Introduction

To adopt a quote from the Preface of Seyla Benhabib’s first book, Critique, Norm, and Utopian: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, my doctoral studies began “with a question and a suspicion.” My question, like that of Benhabib’s, concerns the plausibility of Jürgen Habermas’s effort to base the normative foundations of critical theory upon a moral theory of discourse. And again, like Benhabib, my suspicion concerns the possibility of developing an alternative normative foundation for critical theory. Unlike her careful analysis, which concludes “this suspicion has proved untenable,” I think my research suggests a viable alternative.1 In the following study I argue that a psychoanalytically informed rethinking of Habermas’s earlier work may assist in overcoming some of the stumbling stones and deadlocks of his later work. As a corollary, my re-visioning of Habermas’s early work may also be productive as a means of keeping alive the creative and provocative critical intuitions of the early Frankfurt School theorists. My argument begins by tracing some key concepts in the writings of the Frankfurt School alongside Habermas’s earlier writings as a means of suggesting missed opportunities. If there is a guiding phrase for my research it is Adorno’s aphorism “the preponderance of the object,” a phrase I take to include moments of neglect and forgetting. As is well known, the principal architects of critical theory, particularly Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, each in their own way argue that the recollection of the past includes the pathos and recognition of missed opportunities, moments in history where the achievement of a more genuinely humane world, the reasonable conditions of life, could have emerged but did not. The sentiment is appropriate because this is precisely what my argument aims to show. I am recuperating and reflecting upon a missed opportunity located in the contradictions and crevices of Habermas’s earlier writings. I am convinced that Habermas’s writings in the 70s, which begin the trend away from the critical spirit of the 1

2


Frankfurt School, and his later writings through the 80s and 90s, paradigmatically represented by Between Facts and Norms, have veered into the realm of what could be called conformist critical theory.2 In many instances Habermas’s mature writings read more like an apology for existing forms of liberal democratic regimes than a critical account of their pathologies, a tendency in critical theory detected by Nancy Fraser when she entitled one of her articles, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?”3 Certainly Habermas remains one of the most articulate critics of modernity, but in my view his critique of modern thought is not tenacious enough, exerting tendencies that are unwittingly accommodating to existing forms of social and political pathology coupled with a theoretical apparatus too easily absorbed into philosophical and political apologetics. Interestingly enough, it is often through his political interventions that Habermas expresses the deepest sympathy with the Frankfurt School theorists.4 When I began my research on Habermas during my M.A. at the University of Toronto, I had naïvely hoped to provide a sustained critique of is work relying primarily on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.5 This rapidly showed itself to be implausible, or at least this kind of critique could only proceed in a limited way. I remain influenced by Adorno and have tried to develop and build upon many of his key concepts without abandoning Habermas’s progressive and theoretically innovative insights. What initially concerned me about Habermas’s thought was an apparent conceptual insensitivity to the ambiguities and contradictions of reason, a concern emerging from lessons I have learned from psychoanalysis. In the most general way I think social interaction is more complicated that Habermas’s theory of communicative action permits. Language is inundated with more than stock definitions, irreducible validity claims, and ubiquitous idealizing assumptions. There are forces operating on and through language that entwine its use with dreams, desires, and fantasies. These affective elements operating on language are not necessarily regressive, they are constitutive elements of thought and speech. These affective elements must be accounted for when trying to articulate a theory of communicative rationality that is not hopelessly hypostatized. To phrase it bluntly: an analysis of reason in language that gives priority to the pragmatic dimensions of language, focusing on universalizing notions about how language works, will minimize or neglect the equally important questions of how language, as a product of the imaginary, comes to be constituted and constitutive of the subject and of intersubjective relations in idiosyncratic and particular ways. To explain these entwinements a psychoanalytically informed understanding of communication in relation to desire and the imagination is required. My findings

Introduction

3

here serve simply as a prolegomenon to what I hope to be a more sustained rethinking of Habermas’s critical theory. Overall, it is my view that more attention needs to be given to subject-object or subject-image relations in the midst of intersubjective relations, both between subjects and internal to the subject; thus my keen interest in Jessica Benjamin’s dialectical emphasis on the intersubjective and the intrasubjective. When I began my research, setting out to investigate problems in Habermas’s communicative theory through the work of Adorno, I increasingly gravitated to the often audacious writings of Marcuse. I thought that Marcuse’s understanding of Eros was promising, but I eventually found it too clumsy and under-theorized to express the complexities of the relation between desire and fantasy that I sought to understand more carefully; likewise, the nebulous concept of “emphatic rationality” often associated with the Frankfurt School was too amorphous to be of much use. It was not until I encountered the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, largely through Habermas’s critique of The Imaginary Institution of Society, that a new path of inquiry was opened for me.6 Around the same time I became intrigued by Axel Honneth’s critique of Habermas in The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, influenced in part by Foucault, and his attempt to articulate and initiate a post-linguistic turn in critical theorizing in The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts.7 My interest in Castoriadis, which seemed to harmonize with my sympathy to anarchist thought, led to the publication of my first article: “The Moral Imaginary of Discourse Ethics.”8 Using Castoriadis’s conception of the imaginary, which is still very important for me, I began to sense the plausibility of developing a more psychoanalytically informed critique of Habermas’s works. My main problem was simple: I found Habermas’s critique of Castoriadis to be persuasive and I found Honneth’s work to remain too close to the original position he set out to criticize. While researching the concept of the imaginary I was directed to the work of Slavoj Žižek by my colleague Darlene Juschka, and for about two years I studied the writings of the Slovene Lacanian School and the writings of Jacques Lacan, with some attention given to the writings of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler. While at first I thought this material would be helpful I gradually became increasingly suspicious and mistrustful of the entire modality of Lacanian inquiry. I include this point because I am aware that this research did influence the tenor of my theoretical trajectory.9 I suspect that anyone familiar with Habermas’s work will recognize that his book Knowledge and Human Interests is theoretically more innovative than the works that come after it. And, at least in my opinion, his debate

4


with Hans-Georg Gadamer, which has sweeping implications for research in the humanities and social sciences, is among the most fascinating philosophical debates of the 20th century. Reflecting on this I discerned that it was the presence of Habermas’s appropriation of Freud, which was in part still under the influence of the writings of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, that interested me, and where I again detected an opening for a version of critical theorizing that seems to have disappeared shortly after the exchange. With this in mind I then, finally, turned back to those scholars identifying with the aims of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School who were also struggling with the less-than-critical tendencies of Habermas’s thought.10 It took a rather long detour to figure out that these were the most valuable thinkers through which to articulate my critique. In most respects each of these thinkers is trying to reconnect Habermasian critical theory with a more differentiated understanding of the entwinement of reason, domination, and autonomy. It is through these influences, some of them productive and others leading into dead ends, that this manuscript took shape. Throughout I have tried to retain many of the precepts of the Frankfurt School as a means of articulating this alternative path. In terms of my theoretical assumptions vis-à-vis Habermas, I am using a concept of the imaginary similar to the one provided by Cornelius Castoriadis: the imaginary “is the unceasing and essentially undetermined (socialhistorical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of ‘something.’ What we call ‘reality’ and ‘rationality’ are its works.”11 The imaginary is a vital aspect of all human activities, linguistic and performative. It is meaning-constituting and, as creative, generative of the signs and symbols that constitute language. There can be no communication without the intersecting imagining of communication. The imaginary, with its stream of identifications and projections, is the means through which the subject can begin to speak and comprehend at all. The imaginary is not, however, an autonomous partner in a public dialogue; on the contrary, it is the underlying schema of discourse and the agency of the positing, creation, and reception of forms. Dealings with the imaginary, as an irrevocable facet of subjectivity, are best conceptualized along the lines of a volatile subject-object or subject-image dialectic. The imaginary works as a petrifying or fossilizing operation on the one hand and as a fragmenting and dissolving force on the other; learning is accomplish through the dissolution of certain ideas and the fusion of others. The imaginary is also subject to revision, modification, and potential transformation, through brutish instrumental calculation or self-conscious and dialogical reflection.

Introduction

5

To further clarify this point: when I am talking about the imaginary as a substratum of subjectivity I have in mind a two-fold notion. First, there is what could be called a natural or prelinguistic imaginary, the interaction of the organic form of the human being with itself in a primary or primordial way. An equally appropriate term would be the instincts. Such an imaginary is primordial and without concept, although not necessarily without shape or form. Second, there is a social and perceptual influence and interaction with this natural imaginary that imprints itself on it: the partial and fragmented— and largely unconscious—acquisition of language and the vicissitudes of the symbolic realm (gestures, posture, and so on). This includes the experience and intensification of perception increasingly mediated by the gradual acquisition of language and eventual emergence of differentiated forms of communication, what I think can be called the non-conceptual or pre-conceptual imaginary. Social interactions give increasing form to the prelinguistic substratum. In both instances, the natural or prelinguistic imaginary and the pre- or non-conceptual imaginary should be viewed as constituting the non-linguistic substratum of consciousness. As I view it, this substratum can be described as an amorphous hunger that is fed with things and with words, gradually merging perceptions and sensations with something more picturesque or phantasmatic than wholly linguistic. The imaginary basis of conscious life operates on and from within our linguistic cognition, with the effect of congealing and fragmenting simultaneously. The easiest, although perhaps misleading, way to describe the relation of the nonlinguistic imaginary to conscious life is through an analogy to the creation of confectionaries. A confectionary is a food product based on sugar. Basically, a candy is made up of raw materials which may include sugar, syrup, or honey and some form of animal or vegetable fat, fruit, etc. In the creation of a candy, the sugar is dissolved in water then boiled and goes through different stages from soft to hard in the crystallization process, resulting in a range of sweets from fudge to toffee and caramel to brittle.12 What I am calling the prelinguistic imaginary is akin to the raw ingredients, the process of boiling is the acquisition of experience wherein the prelinguistic imaginary is dissolved and reconstituted in an increasingly crystallized and conceptual-cultural form. Whatever forms the candy takes, its transformed ingredients retain their plasticity, the elements of heat and water can at any time continue to dissolve or crystallize the confection.13 The unavoidable forward and backward motion in the relation between the imaginary and linguistic cognition is crucial to my understanding of the relation between discourse, desire, and fantasy. Perhaps there is no better phrase to encapsulate this dialectic than Adorno’s aphorism “If thought really yielded to the object . . . the very objects would start talking

6


under the lingering eye.” Or, perhaps one could mention Horkheimer and Adorno’s speculative comments in Dialectic of Enlightenment concerning the possibilities of mindfulness or consciousness of nature in the subject.14 The other kind of imaginary that I refer to is the social imaginary: the world of shared meaning, interpretation and so on, perhaps akin to what Habermas calls the lifeworld.15 Imagination, as opposed to the different valences of the imaginary, simply refers to creativity, the novelty of imagining of something. It is my contention that the natural imaginary cannot be wholly transformed nor rendered transparent, there is a remainder that can best be described as the ineluctable natural basis of human beings, the natural imaginary can be imprinted upon, is malleable, and to some degree is transformed through interaction with others and with the environment, but it is not transcended, otherwise human beings would cease to be natural beings. Jonathan Lear has nicely captured a similar idea with the phrase “the remainder of life.”16 Coupled with the significance of my differentiated understanding of the imaginary is the notion of desire, which I do not view as completely distinct from Habermas’s theory of human interests. My understanding of the concept of desire is Freudian, influenced primarily by Jessica Benjamin. Desire must be equated with lack and with the potential for agency; desire can be conscious, as an interpretation of interests expressed in fantasy or the social imaginary, or, unconscious, in relation to phantasy. Where concepts of interest and desire depart is in relation to the structure of fantasy and the imaginary, and the supposed rationality inherent to the different stratifications of anthropologically deep-seated human interests. Desire “in-itself ” cannot be theorized as rational; desire is simply an energizing aspect of practice. Empirically, when desire is situated, it may be appropriate to speak of “ideologies of desire,” ways in which desire is implicated within social interactions, institutional structures, and patterns of individual or collective behavior as well as emancipatory, as in a desire for self-reflection.17 By way of introduction, in the most general terms the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas is a sustained analysis of rationality and enlightenment from a social theoretical perspective, a perspective setting out to chart the distortions and malformations of the human use of reason in society and history. Habermas’s writings comprise a body of literature virtually unparalleled throughout the social sciences and humanities, constituting a sustained and systematic defense of the cognitive and normative ideals of the Enlightenment. In brief, Habermas’s thought provides a philosophical justification of the separation of value-spheres and world orientations, the progress of scientific knowledge,

Introduction

7

the material possibility of justice and the propensity for moral autonomy, and even extends to reflections on the relevance of art and the future of religion within modernity. Although much of my argument deals with Habermas’s earlier work, from Knowledge and Human Interests to Communication and the Evolution of Society, my aims are not those of a historiographer. Habermas’s earlier work suggests a direction for social theorizing that I argue he opted not to pursue. While Habermas has often found it necessary to amend the justifications given for particular aspects of his theory, I view his work to be thematically consistent throughout. I have chosen to focus on his earlier work because it is the most suggestive for developing an alternative path to the one he has chosen. It is my assumption that the difference in tone and trajectory between his early and later writings is in no short measure due to the proximity of his early work to the writings and personages of the “inner circle” (Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse) and his gradual counter-balancing use of the “outer circle” (especially Walter Benjamin) to justify the growing gap in philosophical affinity.18 While the creativity and innovative depth of Habermas’s early Marxian analyses are self-admittedly plagued with contradictions and tensions, the attempt to resolve these apparent ambiguities has steered his thoughts in the direction of his later inquiries. It should be stressed that I am not providing a sustained or systematic critique of Habermas’s later works. In my view drawing on the unresolved tensions in his earlier work is productive, and in doing so I am seeking to revisit those concepts and ideas that may yet again be taken up within critical theory. My choice is perhaps not unlike Habermas’s decision in his writings on labor and interaction to emphasize Hegel’s writings from his Jena years rather than the later works written in Berlin. My critique and analysis of Habermas’s research has two sides. One is philosophical, presented in my various attempts to clarify Habermas’s basic concepts. The other side is feminist and psychoanalytic, concerned with productive contributions that feminist thought and psychoanalysis have to offer Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality and discourse ethics. The motive for my inquiry is relatively straightforward. I wish to re-infuse Habermas’s work with the critical spirit that first animated his thoughts, a spirit that a politically sensitive Horkheimer once warned Adorno about.19 I pursue this intention by raising questions about his writings in relation to the concerns of the earlier generation of critical theorists, controversies resulting from his debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer, and issues raised by feminist theory and psychoanalysis pertaining to recognition. As I see it, the single most salient problem with Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality is his overdetermination of the role of language as constitutive of

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subjectivity. It is argued here that the limits and internal contradictions of Habermas’s theory can be detected in his appropriation of psychoanalysis, his debate with Gadamer and the hermeneutic tradition, and his conceptualization of reason and reciprocity. My final judgment on Habermas’s work is that it suffers unnecessarily from an inadequate theorization of the relation between desire and fantasy in intersubjective relations. The result of this inadequacy is that Habermas’s model of interaction produces a hypostatized understanding of the relation between rationality and communication due to an underestimation of the significance of the natural and imaginary elements of human experience. My questions and concerns do not dissolve an interest in the “reasonable conditions of life.”20 The critique of reason is the lynchpin of critical theorizing and for me the critique of communicative rationality, in lights of its apologetic tendencies, is a pressing issue. My manuscript begins by providing a brief introduction to the critical theorizing of the principal members of the Frankfurt School. The first chapter focuses on the trajectory of critical theory highlighting concepts that I think have continued relevance within Habermas’s writings. In particular, I discuss concepts of reason and history, myth and enlightenment, ideology and ideology critique, and subject and object in relation to the utopian tropes of their work. The second chapter discusses Habermas’s appropriation of Freud and his discontinuous writings on nature. Starting with Habermas’s theory of human interests, I demonstrate that the conceptualization of the acquisition of language as instituting a radical break with nature is problematic. Following Joel Whitebook, it is argued that psychoanalysis provides a bridge to analyze the complexities of internal and external nature that does not dissolve the tension between the subjects’ relation to self as object within the context of the intersubjective formation of subjectivity and identity. The third chapter deals with Habermas’s debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer, the critical theory and hermeneutics encounter. In this debate Habermas deploys psychoanalysis as an example of a form of inquiry that undermines the universality of hermeneutics. Situating Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as theoretically naïve, Habermas advocates a more scientific and procedural form of analysis and stresses the way in which hermeneutics encounters its limitations from within. Habermas’s solution to this dilemma advances what he calls the reconstructive sciences, a mode of theoretical inquiry that escapes the snares of a historically dependent and interpretively bound approach. My critique in this chapter argues that Habermas does not succeed in his task, at least not completely. As Habermas has formulated his objections he cannot escape the centrality of interpretation in discursive

Introduction

9

relations. Furthermore, his understanding of psychoanalytic inquiry and his supposition of language as primarily public and only derivatively private prevents him from moving beyond a model of critical hermeneutics. As a rejoinder, drawing on the work of J. M. Bernstein and Albrecht Wellmer, I argue for a more aesthetic and narrative understanding of intersubjectivity, selfreflection, and self-understanding. Here I show that subjects articulate their identities in a socio-narrative form, a form misperceived when approached in a formal-pragmatic manner, accomplishing both more and less than Habermas’s concept of emancipatory self-reflection intends. Understood this way subjective identity is better grasped as structured by a phantasmic and narrative horizon rather than solely by publicly constituted language games. Close attention to this narrative form constitutes part of the aim and object of psychoanalytic inquiry: the elucidation of the imaginary as it serves as the basis of identity and identity-formation. The fourth chapter follows up on the findings of the third. Using the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Slavoj Žižek as exemplars, I develop a theory of secular revelation as an alternative to Habermas’s project of reconstructive science, thus keeping with the desire and intention of developing a post-hermeneutic understanding of critical theory. My interests here coincide with Seyla Benhabib’s and J. M. Bernstein’s emphasis on the “transfiguring character of human activity.” It is argued in this chapter that a theory of revelation, which finds a three-fold justification via the philosophy of history, aesthetic theory, and the philosophy of language, is a better means for overcoming hermeneutic objections to critical theory. At this point it is also argued that Habermas’s theory cannot accommodate such insights as long as it remains doggedly attached to an overdetermined and idealized understanding of communication. The fifth chapter examines the different ways in which recognition and the struggle for recognition are developed in the work of Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Jessica Benjamin. Against Habermas and Honneth I argue that Benjamin’s approach is the most promising since it does not reduce subjectivity to its linguistic elements nor does it equate breakdowns in communication as pathological. It is my view that the pathologies diagnosed within Habermas’s communicative theory rest on an unrealistic expectation and a misunderstanding of the constitutive elements of subjectivity, again stemming from his idealized understanding of communicative relations. It is argued that Benjamin’s paradoxical conception of the intersubjective view offers a significant and promising alternative to Habermas’s procedural approach to argumentation and rational adjudication that does justice to the imaginary and narrative elements of subjectivity. Unlike Habermas’s analysis, Benjamin’s

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feminist approach is also sensitive to the internal constitution of power as an irreducible element of subjectivity and, because of this, is able to progressively theorize the domination of nature within and without, a crucial element of the Frankfurt School’s analysis often marginalized if not abandoned. Summarily, I am seeking to provide an alternative path for critical theorizing, drawing on Habermas earlier works and reconnecting such research to the lineage of the Frankfurt School. It is my view that Habermas’s earlier conception of an emancipatory interest relies not on how language works, his later conclusion, but on a desire for emancipation, a partiality with reason for happiness and freedom. Desire is informed by fantasy and imagination, and the cultivation of the desire for freedom I see to be a modern project, quite close to the emphatic conception of reason that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse are interested in. For this impulse the critique of reason is simultaneously critique of fantasy. In order for this to be viable it is necessary to develop a theory of imagination alongside a theory of intersubjectivity. I think psychoanalysis is in the best position to do this, but the project receives support in my studies from a variety of fields: linguistics, hermeneutics, historiography, and aesthetics. I have selected a theory of recognition as an ideal starting point. Overall, I see my research as contributing to the articulation of a unique form of inquiry: critical theory, a theoretical trajectory that remains aligned with an interest in happiness, freedom, and truth by way of the critique of reason “run amok.” I am not trying to reproduce Habermas’s project by reformulating it in terms of imagination and desire rather than discourse and rationality. I take the position that critical theorizing must address theses issues alongside one another without subordinating or privileging any of them. Hence: discourse, desire, and fantasy.

Chapter One

The Project of Critical Theory: An Introduction to the Thought of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse

“Reason today seems to suffer from a kind of disease.” Max Horkheimer, “Reason Against Itself ”

The following provides an introduction to the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. In each case I highlight aspects of their work that are thematic for my thesis as a whole: fantasy and imagination, ideology and ideology critique, nature and culture, reconciliation and utopian longing, and subject and object. These points are summarized here for the purpose of providing an introduction to critical theory as well as providing an abbreviated intellectual context for the later work of Jürgen Habermas. FROM SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY TO CRITICAL THEORY: A BRIEF INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT OF MAX HORKHEIMER When Max Horkheimer delivered his inaugural address in 1931, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” he set forth a research agenda encompassing “the entire material and intellectual culture of humanity.”1 In his address he traces the emergence of social philosophy to Hegel who broke with Kant’s idealist conception of the subject liberating self-consciousness from egoistic introspection by shifting the question of the essence of self-consciousness to the work of history, the context of subjectivity giving itself objective form. With Hegel, Horkheimer observes, philosophical understanding is insight into “the meaning of our own existence according to its true value and content.”2 Hegel was able 11

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to see that the subjective capacity for self-determination rests not on the basis of a spontaneous ego, but extends from the processes of a universal dialogical logic, the co-existence of the collective rather than the individual. Conceived in this way, even under conditions of impoverishment human beings have the capacity to creatively negate and transform existing reality in accord with their interests and passions. Although the absolutist aspects of the tradition of idealism are now exhausted, Horkheimer argues the rational elements of idealism can be sublimated within a comprehensive social theory. Hegel’s dialectics, as illustrated by the writings of Marx, is seen to set out a reasonable philosophical model along with the ideational core of a progressively minded social philosophy. According to Horkheimer, Hegel’s understanding history, as the work of the subject giving itself objective form, is the recognition of the activity of World Spirit manifest in the conflict of concrete ideas, the individual interests, drives, and passions of human beings. While Hegel was cognizant that history could be viewed as the “altar on which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals are slaughtered,” he also claimed that the philosopher must rise above the empirical realm of suffering and death, showing that injustice and domination are merely apparent, and that in all events “reason is fulfilled.”3 For Horkheimer, it is because of Hegel’s naive idealism, a faith rendered obsolete in the face of the utter meaninglessness and unjust suffering and death, that the task of social philosophy must be taken up anew. Horkheimer argues that social philosophy must again address itself to one of the oldest and most important dilemmas: the relation between the economic life of society, the psychical development of individuals, and the changes in the realm of culture.4 In the early stages of Horkheimer’s thought this program is taken up in the form of interdisciplinary materialist studies, committed to the emancipation of human beings from autarchic vicissitudes of fate. Horkheimer’s interest in emancipation can be traced back to his early writings. His philosophical attitude is distinguished by a characteristic and profound moral protest against social injustice coupled with a utopian desire for a better world. This is neither a straightforward moralism nor an abstract utopianism. For instance, in his essay “Materialism and Morality” (1933) Horkheimer understands morality to represent the “concern for the development and happiness of life as a whole.”5 He argues that morality must not simply be concerned with questions of good and evil, but with an evaluation of the categories good and evil as well; a non-historicist account of the conditions of their arising. As Horkheimer explains, “Morality does not admit of any grounding—neither by means of intuition nor of argument.”6 The grounding of practices in philosophy is impossible.7 This lack

The Project of Critical Theory

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of a philosophical grounding does not mean that social philosophy is relative, only that it must be aware of its limitations and historical situation.8 The materialist theory presumes no transhistorical authority and rejects the facile motivation of fear, often sanctimoniously handed down as absolutist ethical conduct. What might be considered right and wrong, and what constitutes the consummate power of “the ought,” is precisely what needs to be explained and elaborated upon in light of the brutalization of personal and public life. Thus, adopting an immanent and critical perspective, the materialist theory does not recommend ethical solutions to social crises.9 The theoretical expression itself stands in a relation to truth and is part of the reasonable striving towards the abolition of existing misery. Just as Horkheimer finds no possibility for a theoretical justification of morality, he does not assume to discern a non-tautological justification for the materialist project. The emancipatory moment in Horkheimer’s thought is intimately connected with the relation between theorizing and truth, and truth as a condition of reasonable practice. The anticipatory utopian horizon of Horkheimer’s thought reveals only negatively the possible conditions of its fulfillment.10 In this early phase of the development of the critical theory, Horkheimer can find only two possible expressions of morality: compassion, which resists the view of human beings as objects of fate or accident, and politics, borne out of dialectical critique. While Horkheimer’s emphatic philosophy anticipates morality as a goal, he also recognizes that the interests and passions of human beings change in relation to historical processes. As a means of understanding these changes Horkheimer draws on Freud’s theory of instincts as much as on a Marxian philosophy of history.11 The aim of the materialist theory is to explain how and why authority is produced and reproduced. However, due to the conditional nature of all philosophical thought Horkheimer regards any pretence of certainty to be suspect: in an unjust world, all assertions of metaphysics become totalizing and enter into conflict with the historical processes giving rise to their need.12 Horkheimer’s views on the desire for certainty in an uncertain world can be situated more broadly in his reception of Hegel, Marx’s critique of religion, and in the psychoanalysis of Freud. Horkheimer writes, for example, that the “dissatisfaction with earthly destiny is the strongest motive for acceptance of a transcendental being” but also, one might add, an ephemeral and transcendental philosophy.13 In traditional theorizing, ambiguity is rejected in practice and in principle. As with his awareness of the importance of the idealist and materialist tradition, Horkheimer shares in a positive evaluation of Freud’s metapsychology.14

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Horkheimer’s interest in psychoanalysis is evident in nearly all of his writings and in 1942, when Ernst Kris asked Leo Löwenthal about the Frankfurt Institute’s attitude towards Freud, Löwenthal wrote to Horkheimer for advice on how to reply. Horkheimer responded, “I think you should be simply positive. We really are deeply indebted to Freud and his first collaborators. His thought is one of the foundation stones without which our own philosophy would not be what it is.”15 Horkheimer’s desire to further incorporate psychoanalysis into the materialist project of the Institute led to the appointment of Erich Fromm as a full time member. Fromm, along with Horkheimer, became the leading theoretical architects of critical theory during the early and mid 1930s. Fromm’s contribution to the early stages of critical theory resides on several levels. Not only did he first articulate the dynamics of the sadomasochistic character, an early proto-type for the “authoritarian personality,” he also forged the crucial links between Marx and Freud that had not yet been elaborated to the satisfaction of the membership of the Frankfurt Institute. The innovation of Fromm that had a lasting impact was the way in which he drew on Freudian concepts in order to express the mediation between the individual and society, without collapsing the distinction between psychology and sociology. His work represents some of the earliest and most sustained attempts to integrate Marx and Freud in the form of an analytic social psychology, arguing that psychoanalysis could provide the missing link between ideological superstructure and socio-economic base. Like Horkheimer, Fromm persistently draws attention to social conditions, such as misery and oppression, which produce ideas favoring certain ruling class interests. Such ruling interests, he argues, reproduce and foster the infantile situation for those who are subjected to them.16 In the essay “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology” (1932) Fromm summarily writes: (1) The realm of human drives is a natural force which, like other natural forces (soil fertility, natural irrigation, etc.), is an immediate part of the substructure of the social process. Knowledge of this force, then, is necessary for a complete understanding of the social process. (2) The way ideologies are produced and function can only be understood correctly if we know how the system of drives operates. (3) When economically conditioned factors hit upon the realm of drives, some modifications occur; by virtue of the influence of drives, the social process operates at a faster or slower tempo than one would expect if not theoretical consideration to the psychic factors is given.17


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The contradiction between the individual and society, between the plasticity of the drives and the rigid laws of the economy, led the members of the Institute away from synthesizing the insights of sociology and psychology. It became apparent that both disciplines could easily enough provide explanations such that their respective object disappears. Instead of explaining society or the psyche away, Horkheimer envisions a tension between their disciplinary insights, refusing to let thought yield before the labor of contradiction. For Horkheimer, the moment of nonidentity between psychology and sociology should be maintained as much as possible in a society where the individual is threatened by dissolution. This became an insight that would be put to use in the gradual shift from interdisciplinary materialism to critical theory.18 The inability to maintain this tension is precisely what was thought to be problematic in the work of other appropriations of Freud.19 The mutual reinforcement of Fromm’s earlier work and Horkheimer’s theoretical advances toward a materialist critique of society culminates in the Frankfurt Institute’s collaborative research project, Studies on Authority and the Family (1936). Horkheimer’s lead essay, “Authority and the Family,” stresses the importance of understanding why a society functions in a certain way, an aim requiring intimate knowledge of the psychological dynamics of individuals within social groups. More than any other field of inquiry, psychoanalysis assists in explaining how external prohibitions are taken into the psyche itself in the form of internalization as well as helping to explain the failure of the internalization of norms. Horkheimer emphasizes this dialectic from his earlier writings, arguing that at certain times cultural institutions are expressions of the human psyche, while at other times the shape of the psyche is more a function of cultural forces.20 By adopting a dialectical approach, Horkheimer was able to provide an innovative analysis of the way in which authority and hope for change are accepted and resisted the context of various familiar relations.21 Horkheimer argues, for instance, that the bourgeois household has a paradoxical place in society, both preparing individuals to accept authority relations but also protecting individuals from the harsh dictates of the economy. He writes: The family not only educates for authority in bourgeois society; it also cultivates the dream of a better condition for mankind. In the yearning of many adults for the paradise of their childhood, in the way a mother can speak of her son even through he has come into conflict with the world, in the protective love of a wife for her husband, there are ideas and forces at work which admittedly are not dependent on the existence of the family in its present form and, in fact, are even in danger of shrivelling up

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Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory in such a milieu, but which, nevertheless, in the bourgeois system of life rarely have any place but the family where they can survive at all.22

In Horkheimer’s view, while under patriarchal tutelage the son’s identification with the father made it possible to develop a superego and a mature sense of responsibility and solidarity. The mother, on the other hand, serves as an example of submission although maternal love is also theorized as a reserve of resistance and anti-authoritarianism.23 With the decline of the father and the externalization of authority in favor of anonymous social forces, as well as the increasing numbers of women (mothers) entering the workforce, the adolescent is thought to no longer have a familiar point of paternal authoritarian identification or maternal anti-authoritarian resistance.24 Although the Institute’s study is not unproblematic, it did set the tone for much of Horkheimer’s later thoughts on the invasiveness of instrumental reason and authority.25 The Institute’s studies on authority and the family paved the way for many of Horkheimer’s provocative essays in Eclipse of Reason (1947), especially “The Revolt of Nature” and “Rise and Decline of the Individual.” In these essays Horkheimer reflects on the way in which the subjugation of nature is equally the subjugation of human beings, a theme also pursued in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). In an industrial society, because the child is confronted directly with collective forces, the possible safe-haven of a “psychological household” disintegrates.26 He argues that the adoption of a superego embodying the principles of the father and other father-like figures acculturates obedience without which the child must forfeit the love of his parents (Horkheimer was invariably concerned with the development of the male child). The displeasure attached to obedience, Horkheimer notes, develops into a deep hostility toward the father and is eventually translated into abstract resentment against civilization itself. It is argued that this situation creates a condition in which “the submissive individual is one whose unconscious has become fixed at the level of repressed rebellion against his real parents” and the mimetic capacity is converted from a rational capacity for solidarity and compassion into an inflexible destructive force.27 Although Horkheimer maintains that there are some forces of resistance to this process, as long as individuality has lost its economic basis under the sway of the colossi of industrial powers, the “natural revolt,” which is also a sign of the decline of the individual, becomes the ground for fascist manipulation and the subjective disappearance of the reality of the outer world. While in 1931 Horkheimer intended the Institute’s project of social philosophy to be a mutual endeavor in which philosophers, sociologists, economics, historians, and psychologists are brought together in a permanent


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collaboration, by 1937, when Horkheimer’s essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” appears, the role of social philosophy had been modified in light of the changed institutional and political circumstances of the Institute.28 In Horkheimer’s well known essay the project of interdisciplinary materialist studies was subsumed by an increasingly critical theory, a “critical attitude” which progressively takes on a more antagonistic relation with the traditional disciplines.29 Here Horkheimer outlines the link between traditional theory and the reality of social life dominated by industrial production techniques.30 Traditional theory, according to Horkheimer, participates in procedures of classification whereby knowledge and the production of knowledge become deluded exercises in the “creative sovereignty of thought.”31 The sovereignty of thought, he notes, lends itself to the devaluation of the object by way of a purely conceptual determination, a process mirrored in the treatment of workers under the regime of universal exchange in capitalism. This determination rests on a logical error, the mistake of taking the concept not as representative of an object, but as the object itself. The determination of reality from abstract concepts combined with the law of exchange is a crucial aspect of how Horkheimer understands reification, the creation of a distorted social consciousness. For Horkheimer, reification occurs in the context of late capitalism, where almost any object can stand in for another object of unlike equivalence; a thesis owing much to the work of Georg Lukács. The implications of reification are significant. For instance, a theory of reification explains why contradictions in theory are taken to signal problems in reality, the inadequacy of reality apprehended as an object rather than an objective expression of reality. Instead of the theory taking stock of these contradictions, a reified consciousness finds the solution to such problems in the form of technical reasoning, working to abolish them altogether. This process is a function of the prevailing forms of political economy as well as a process that reproduces such economic forms. Horkheimer maintains that through the application of the products of knowledge to social phenomenon the historical character of the object perceived and the historical character of subjective perception come to be neglected.32 Science becomes an appendage of power, in direct contrast with its emphatic aim of the determination of truth and falsehood. In relations of power, thought tends toward becoming absolute, striving for consistency and in doing so conforming to rigid law-like hypotheses. In this context, Horkheimer maintains, theory is reified and expresses an ahistorical ideology.33 In contrast to this increasingly common state of affairs, he argues that the philosopher and scientist alike must take up a “critical attitude” that is “wholly distrustful” of the predominant categories, including “better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable.”34 The critical attitude is

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one that is characterized by negativity, an attitude which aims at the emancipation of human beings and the transformation of society from the viewpoint of a mutilated subjectivity.35 The critical theory takes part in a negative appraisal of existing realities. The appraisal is negative on account of the apologetic tendency of a positive or affirmative philosophy which implicitly justifies facts in isolation from all else, and because of the uncertainty of future predictions, often calculated and enforced using the very rationality that Horkheimer seeks to undermine. The most sustained attempt to diagnose the current crisis of civilization is Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, originally entitled Philosophical Fragments and distributed to a select audience. The reviews, even those most sympathetic to their position, were ambiguous. After receiving a copy of the text, Marcuse wrote to Horkheimer, “I have gone through the Fragmente twice, and I have reread many sections more than twice. However my reading was not continuous and concentrated enough . . . The result: there are too many passages which I don’t understand, and too many ideas which I cannot follow up beyond the condensed and abbreviated form in which you give them.”36 Marcuse’s relative silence about the book on dialectical logic that Horkheimer and Adorno had set for themselves is representative of its overall reception, at least until the 1960s. Although the text thematically hangs together, many of the concepts deployed are contrary when taken as an analytic whole. This is a deliberate stylistic feature. Adorno writes, “In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one.”37 Drawing on the self-reflective metapsychological concepts developed by Freud, the materialist dialectic of negativity in Hegel, a Marxian critique of political economy alongside the insights of Lukács, Nietzsche, and Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno creatively entwine Hegel’s notion of “the cunning of reason” with Freud’s understanding of the relations of culture, society, and instinctual nature, the libido in particular. Horkheimer and Adorno’s thought culminates in the speculative thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment: enlightenment has become myth, and civilization has become barbarism. The authors see fascism, for instance, as a logical outcome of late capitalism. This dialectic turnaround has its origins in the rise of instrumental reason, the advent of positivism, commodity fetishism, and the erosion of the family in relation to the organization of the economy. The task of a critical theory is to capture this truth and provide conceptual tools for the reversal of this tendency, a thesis which emphatically does not call for the reversal of enlightenment. In each moment of enlightenment, moments that ought to be progressing toward the happiness and autonomy of humankind, Horkheimer


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and Adorno detect an array of regressive tendencies. Relying on Freud’s theory of instincts, regression is seen as a withdrawal of consciousness toward more and more animalistic forms of social consciousness, where fear and anxiety come to govern and guide human behaviors and attitudes. Instead of reconciliation with nature, society appears to be entwined in a downward spiral, the introversion of sacrifice, an ever increasing decline of subjectivity and social freedom and a movement toward the complete domination of nature and society. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the mastery of nature, which includes mastery over the self, has led to the near liquidation of the individual, a catastrophic civilization that instead of protecting the individual from harm opens up a myriad of opportunities for new forms of suffering and collective vulnerability. Ironically, and tragically, it is the very attempt to preserve the self and the collective from harm that aggravates and exploits these vulnerabilities further. In their text, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that through the undermining of substantive rational thought and the manipulation of reason by mass culture there is a regression to “judgment without judging,” the replacement of experience with cliché and imagination with acceptance.38 Their thesis is paradoxical: because the rationality of enlightenment excludes the irrational, it ends up purifying its own non-rational elements in a self-destructive way. This corrosive process, in the era of fascism and late-industrial society, entails that subjection become a condition of subjectivity, an illusionary form of voluntary domination rendering the experience of subjection inaccessible on account of its appearance of rationality. Under such circumstances it becomes possible to have knowledge of domination without the experience. The dialectic of enlightenment is threatened with being overcome altogether. In the first chapter Horkheimer and Adorno provide an examination of the concept of enlightenment. Enlightenment does not refer to a temporal stage in the development of humankind, but ranges from the archaic to the present day, an epoch of rationalization as it appears presently. Enlightenment is understood more in terms of a structure of thought than a chronological bracket. In Dialectic of Enlightenment Freud’s Oedipal father is replaced by Homer’s Odysseus, the cunning one, as an allegorical figure of the bourgeois household, an anticipatory representative of contemporary capitalist logic. Their critique is an immanent one, drawing on the tension between the aims of enlightenment (freedom, happiness, and security) and the intended or unintended realizations following from the means through which these aims are accomplished. Starting with Bacon’s understanding of knowledge, Horkheimer and Adorno write, “Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its

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enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters . . . Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital.”39 Accordingly, exploitation and enslavement are carried out in the name of science and progress, and subjection to these processes is understood as a form of salvation, liberation from the cruelty of natural existence. The disenchantment of the world becomes an assumption and a methodical procedure, culminating not only in the exorcism of gods and demons and the cry of terror which is attached to undifferentiated nature, but the expulsion of all sources of meaning, including substance and quality, activity and suffering, being and existence.40 Knowledge, in this narrow sense, is perceived solely in terms of power: things are known only insofar as they can be manipulated.41 Methodology and the classifications invoked by thought become repetitious, and freedom is equated not with a self-reflective ego but with an unhindered id.42 Anything that cannot be grasped in its immediacy or manipulated with impunity is to be feared, destroyed, escaped, or imitated. Everything perceived of as external to the subject must be tamed, including the undisciplined subject itself: the incommensurable is cut off. For Horkheimer and Adorno, scientific or technical progress produces the context in which the ego is consistently drawn into a more and more undifferentiated state of primary narcissism, a regression whereby libidinal cathexis is withdrawn from an object and turned back on the subject.43 This is indicative of the weakness of the ego to enact rational thought and make distinctions between external and internal reality, the capacity to apprehend the object without controlling it, and its strength, the power required to repress its own constitution and continually turn away or keep something at a distance. Horkheimer and Adorno point out that this narrowly enacted understanding of enlightenment underlies positivism, fascism, the culture industry and anti-Semitism, all reinforcing the regressive narcissism symptomatic of late capitalism. As the ego is rendered increasingly defenseless against the libidinally charged techniques of industrial and commercial manipulation, the capacity and potential for dialectical thought is diminished. Authoritarian forces thus align with the manipulation of aggressive and self-destructive tendencies for which the alienated individual has few means of protection. The problem, Horkheimer and Adorno note, is that compliance to the heteronomous remains even when the thin veil of deception is lifted. “That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.”44 Their diagnosis would undoubtedly have not been tinged with a


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moment of anguish had the appearance of any kind of social resistance been visible to them. The lack of significant resistance is, in part, the result of the loss of meaning that the artificially produced subject encounters in her or his labor, the alienation of the marketplace along with class exploitation. Each facet of domination engenders anxiety; not only the anxiety of meaninglessness, but also the fear of ongoing dissolution and the fear of the other, as something untamed within and without. Claustrophobic, the subject turned inward becomes a creature of instinctual rage, calculatingly manipulated by the expert powers of the culture industry. Since the subject is only able to bind itself together by mastering internal nature, the renunciation of instinctive impulses is accompanied by a reification of the means of social production and cognitive organization, a forgetting of the rationality underlying such renunciations. Memory comes to be scorned as weakness and sentimentality. This process of renunciation serves as a source of increasing anxiety and affective ambivalence in which manifest impulses contain both love and hate. What is supposed to bring the subject pleasure, however false this pleasure may be, is transformed into abstract terror: “Humanity . . . is forced back to more primitive anthropological stages, since, with the technical facilitation of existence, the continuance of domination demands the fixation of instincts by greater repression. Fantasy withers.”45 The ego, which first makes reasoning possible, becomes the only object of satisfaction for the id since it is the only meaningful thing left. In additional to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer’s lasting contributions to the articulation of critical theory are found in The Eclipse of Reason and The Critique of Instrumental Reason (1967). Due to the turmoil that the Institute for Social Research faced in the 1930s, Horkheimer and his affiliates were not able to pursue many of their research aims as planned. Although still mindful of interdisciplinary empirical research, Horkheimer’s theoretical writings during the 1940s reflect an ongoing interest in rationality, the “dialectic of myth and enlightenment” and “the critique of instrumental reason” in particular. In terms of possible interdisciplinary work, Horkheimer’s thinking is far less integrative than it was in 1931, each of his analyses further strain the possibility of setting out what legitimate empirical inquiry might look like, although such a project is never completely given up on. Near the end of Horkheimer’s intellectual career, he turned toward “the wholly other” as a possible source of resistance to the consuming power of instrumental rationality. It would seem, as many have argued, that Horkheimer had forfeited all hope that the dialectic of enlightenment could be carried out within the concepts of instrumental reason serving to accomplish

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nothing more than perpetuate the very cycle of domination that critical theorizing condemns. Perhaps Horkheimer’s longing for the wholly other might be best understood in his appreciation of Schopenhauer’s preference for despair rather than solace.46 SUBJECT AND OBJECT: A BRIEF INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT OF THEODOR W. ADORNO Along with Horkheimer and Fromm, Adorno is one of the main architects of critical theory, his participation with the Institute increasing greatly in the late 1930s (almost around the time of the departure of Fromm). A disciplined musicologist, Adorno also wrote extensively on philosophy and sociology throughout his career. Some of his most celebrated works include the co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment, The Philosophy of Modern Music (1949), Minima Moralia (1951), Negative Dialectics (1966), and Aesthetic Theory (published posthumously in 1970). Aside from his tremendous contributions to aesthetics, one of the important moments of Adorno’s philosophical project is his relentless pursuit of the subject-object dialectic. While there is a great deal of overlap between Horkheimer and Adorno, so much so that Adorno often indicated that their philosophical spirit was one, he also developed a unique and remarkable philosophical style and expression. Strangely, much criticism of Adorno’s work resides in a rather unmediated reception of these stylistic elements, Habermas being a notable representative of this trend. For the purpose of an introduction, I will focus primarily on Adorno’s elucidation of the subject-object dialectic since it provides the most concise formulation of negativity, identity, and recognition. Adorno began his professional career with a sweeping indictment of the intellectual establishment. In his inaugural lecture to the philosophy faculty of the University of Frankfurt (1931) he castigates the “ontological blueprints” of Heidegger, the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School, the Lebensphilosophie of Simmel, the southwest-German School of Rickert, and the various scientistic philosophies that have stayed clear of idealism but lost contact with the historical problems of philosophy.47 His brash address called for an interpretive philosophy which in no way coincides with the hermeneutic problem of meaning, suggesting that the historical text which philosophy has to read is “incomplete, contradictory and fragmentary.”48 To aggravate this explosive exposition further, he openly declared that the program proposed is impossible, “not only from the limits of time” but because such a program “does not allow itself to be worked out in completeness and generality.”49 Nevertheless, the aim of this philosophical project is to construct keys,


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trial arrangements, and constellations: historical images which dissolve and resolve its self-posited questions. The epistemological metaphors scattered throughout the address owe much to the image of fireworks: flashes of illumination and sparks mixed with the disintegration of the material set ablaze. The radical invention of Adorno’s project is that of an “an exact fantasy,” the idea of the imagination of difference without a reconciliation of duress. Adorno characterizes his project as one of “unfruitful negativity,” a dialectical and materialist philosophy.50 The persistence of this contrary impulse can be felt over thirty years later when Adorno prefaces Negative Dialectics with the comment that dialectics seeks to “use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity.”51 In the most general sense, Adorno’s philosophical thought is an anti-system, an unfolding of the insight that “the whole is the false.”52 The paradox of a negative philosophy is that it rests on the imaginative judgment, a kind of utopian mirage perhaps, of a retroactive figure of a possible but failed reconciliation. This mirage is a negative intimation of a past event that never took place but through remembrance may hold utopian possibilities for a difference future.53 This imaginative judgment is the speculative power of philosophy. Adorno opens his well known text expressing this incongruity: Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried . . . Having broken its pledge to be as one with reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself.54

Adorno’s position is not a prophetic lament; rather, it includes a judgmental paradox that dialectically sustains the stubborn consistency of a critical social theory. Only in a world without domination would such a retroactive myth of failed reconciliation no longer be necessary. This paradoxical model, along with other models that Adorno employs, can be understood as “emphatic.” Simon Jarvis explains this point with regard to ideology: The notion that ideology has a truth-moment may sound paradoxical, but it is closely tied to Adorno’s reflection on the relationship between prescription and description, ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ Concepts such as freedom, humanity and justice are what Adorno calls ‘emphatic’ concepts in the sense that they are ineliminably both prescriptive and descriptive.

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Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory Nowhere can we point to an example of a free human being; yet the judgement that human beings are free, because it deploys an emphatic concept, carries an implicit prescriptive truth along with its descriptive incorrectness.55

The paradoxical nature of truth proposed in Adorno’s work is part of the difficulty of grasping the subject-object dialectic, theorized in such a way that understanding the complexity of the problem is elusive. This is no less a stylistic feature than a recalcitrant element of Adorno’s attempt to think in contradictions: “True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.”56 Negative dialectics is a project that seeks to pitch thinking against itself.57 The subject-object dialectic is the centerpiece of Adorno’s thought. For Adorno, the subject is both a particular individual and a universal condition of consciousness. These two aspects of the subject are reciprocally related, making it possible to speak of “individual humanity.”58 The concept, “subject,” however, should not take priority over that to which it is applied. What the subject is as an object and how it is understood as a concept is not identical. The rigorous determination of any object in thought, Adorno argues, truncates the object “for the sake of conceptual manageability.”59 Philosophy, limited by its conceptuality, must strive ever more to disclose the very dimensions of reality that its constitution resists. Attention must be given to the way in which the concept participates in the object, the subjective means of participation in the unfolding of the object. Adorno sees this dialectical movement as grasping the nonidentity of identity and non-identity. The subject-object dialectic is an attempt to theorize this idea: dialectic is a conversation of the subject with the object. Due to the inadequacy of philosophy to accomplish this task in a straightforward way, philosophical thought must approach reality, without resignation, through the use of models, constellations. Thought must seek to be coincidental with its object, critically reconstructing concepts as they have been historically received, without the violence of an imposition. Thought that lends its attention to the object stands in affinity with something that is not identical. This aporia is the disenchanting dialectic of myth and enlightenment, the disenchanting of the concept but not necessarily the object. As noted in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the division of subject and object is prefigured in the division between the animate and inanimate by “primitive people.” This is not a comment on the prehistory of human beings, but a commentary on the conceptualization of prehistory from within enlightened thought. Horkheimer and Adorno write:


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If the tree is addressed no longer as simply a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical. Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language. The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.60

The division between subject and object, which is understood in this passage as a “cry of terror” before the power of the deities, is both true and false. True, because the human condition is sundered; false, because this fracture must not be taken to be absolute or invariant. If subject and object are thought of as radically split then the subject “swallows the object, forgetting how much it is object itself.”61 The subject that takes itself as sovereign severs the link between consciousness and reality, between subject and object. Under the regime of late capitalism, the temptation toward the hypostatization of subject and object is the product of rage as much as it is anxiety, a fearful recollection of undifferentiated nature: The system in which the sovereign mind imagined itself transfigured, has its primal history in the pre-mental, the animal life of the species. Predators get hungry, but pouncing on their prey is difficult and often dangerous; additional impulses may be needed for the beast to dare it. These impulses and the unpleasantness of hunger fuse into rage at the victim . . . The animal to be devoured must be evil. The sublimation of this anthropological schema extends all the way to epistemology . . . The system is the belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and every idealism.62

From prehistory (as it appears to modern thought) to contemporary epistemology, Adorno traces the dialectic of enlightenment as culminating most systematically in idealism (Kant and Fichte). The critique of idealism, he notes, reveals the positing of a transcendental subject as a false abstraction from living individual human beings. However, this critique, attributed to Nietzsche and Husserl, did not yield a more differentiated understanding of the subject. Rather than giving primacy to the object, it was the conditioned subject that was theorized as unconditioned. The derivative or the conditional became primary, and thus unconditional. Adorno notes that the ideological function of this thesis should not be overlooked: “The more individuals are

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in effect degraded into functions within the societal totality as they are connected up to the system, the more the person pure and simple, as a principle, is consoled and exalted with the attributes of creative power, absolute rule, and spirit.”63 The transcendental subject thus returns as ideology in the form of the critique of idealism. This return does have a kernel of truth, disclosing in microcosm the magnitude of the political economy for which rational relations are abstracted from individuals in the exchange model.64 Seeking to avoid the primacy of the subject engendered in idealist philosophy, Adorno argues for the “preponderance of the object.” For this task, as with Horkheimer and Marcuse, Hegel is a decisive thinker. Hegel was the first philosopher to rigorously “explode” the abstract epistemology of Kant’s transcendental subjectivity. The dialectical approach, Adorno remarks, is a “method of anamnesis,” the spirit’s immersion in itself.65 The recollection of the objective constitution of the subject is one of the most important aims of critical theory. The subject-object relation is not, for Adorno, an opposition: the relation is one of mediation. With regard to Hegel, Adorno notes that his dialectic “methodically pursues the reciprocal negation and production of the subjective and objective moments.”66 The ultimate failing of Hegel’s dialectics resides not in his apparent absolutism, but in his idealism, in the way in which he assigns primacy to the subject, to the identical rather than the nonidentical.67 What Adorno finds most attractive in Hegel’s thought is the way in which objectivity is conceived as the result of the dialogical labor of the concept. The labor of the concept is the way in which subjectivity gives to itself objective form, the manifestation of cognition, desire, and interest within history. For the subject, labor becomes the productive unity of the subject and object, a semblance of reconciliation established by coercion called “the cunning of reason.”68 For Hegel, the cunning of reason is the way “objective reason, the realization of freedom, succeeds by means of the blind, irrational passions of historical individuals.”69 The primacy of the object grasps the insight that the subject is also an object in a qualitatively different and more radical sense than the object, but can by no means exist apart from the object. The relation of subject and object is one of mediation, as is the relation between nature and culture, individual and society; this mediated relation is precisely what is forgotten in all forms of idealism. When the object is apprehended as detached from what is nonidentical with it, when the concept is privileged over the object, there is a radical break. This process is enacted whenever consciousness attempts to grasp the object by eliminating the subject, conceived of as nothing more than an obstacle to understanding the object.


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The liquidation of subjective qualities for the sake of the object achieves the reversal of its aim. The purified subject is not coincidental with the freedom of the subject in the form of objectivity, but creates only the semblance or illusion of freedom. This abstracted perception of reality is an abrogation, manifest in a variety of philosophical forms, and demonstrates an intolerance of the non-identical: the subject is sacrificed to the object, a reality prefigured in mythic thinking. Even the remembrance of anything outside the subject is shunned.70 Adorno also notes that the positivist methodologies of science participate in this kind of sacrificial logic, liquidating memory and experience just as much as the culture industry does. This process culminates in the pseudoreality of the transcendental subject. The transcendental subject, for Adorno, is also a paradoxical category. It is as much a fabricated category of society as it is a living fact. The individual as transcendental subject is thus true and false: true as an actual production of society and false as a rigid abstraction. Its truth resides only in the fact of the coercion of an exchange society that translates all particulars into the flow of the universal exchangeability of all things. The idea of a fully autonomous ego, glorified in the work of existentialism for example, is theorized to be a conceptual reification, a moment which Adorno equates with false spiritualization. False spiritualization, however, is also a material force. Adorno observes that the falsity of the transcendental subject of idealism establishes its own truth, the transcendental character of the subject as an object of fetishistic universal exchange. The result is not transcendence, but a thought process congealed into labor, more dead than living, the reduction of the subject to a formal category.71 What was originally an illusionary projection on the part of an idealist notion of the subject has materialized, insofar as this idealism has become a means of organizing the forces of social production. The more the subject is treated as an object within the free market, the more universal the subject becomes, not as subject but as a reified object. The means through which hypostatized subjectivity reproduces itself is what Adorno calls identity thinking, which he characterizes as anti-subjectivistic. Identity thinking is reified consciousness that takes the conceptualized thing for the thing itself; the pre-eminent exemplification of this process being commodity fetishism. It is an attitude that is not only constitutive of modern subjective idealism, but also conditioned by the exchange processes of the political economy. The more the subject is distanced from the object, the more of an object the subject becomes. Purification of the subjective qualities leads away from knowledge of the object by rendering the subjective form autonomous and devoid of its own experiences: “Loss of memory as the

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transcendental condition of science. All reification is forgetting.”72 The experience of the subject under the weight of constituted estrangement is suffering. The expression of such, Adorno emphatically maintains, is the condition of truth.73 Dialectics is a rebellion against empiricism. The position of resistance to the objective condition of unfreedom is experience “without anxiety.” The subject, Adorno argues, must entrust itself to its own experience: “If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start taking under the lingering eye.”74 Only at this point might the object be liberated from the “subjective spell,” the disclosure of the non-identical which approaches what Kant understood as the “thing-in-itself.” The approach of the abyss of the subject, however, is not permissive of a renewed transcendentalism or relativism. Relativism, as much as idealism, “takes the idea of the correct life and wrongly projects it inward.”75 For Adorno, “dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity.”76 Identity thinking is the essence of ideology, both relying on the nonidentical for its semblance, hence the illusionary quality of all identity, and expurgating the nonidentical at the same time. Following Freud as much as Hegel, Adorno views subjectivity as developing through an interaction between the biological organism and the social environment. Thus critical theory is interested in psychoanalysis as a critical theory of subjectivity, refusing to dispense with the subject-object dialectic, and pursing the dialectics of nature and culture and the individual and society without collapsing the distinctions or presupposing ahead of time their possible separation. Without reifying the subject by ascribing an immediate or independent moment to the ego, Adorno is willing to ruthlessly trace the constitution of contemporary subjectivity to its end by means of determinate negation, charting the particular and universal moments of its development. As Russell Jacoby notes, this is also a negative philosophy as much as it is dialectic: “a critical theory of subjectivity . . . is consciously contradictory; it pursues subjectivity till, so to speak, it disappears; its psychoanalysis is negative: a theory of a subject-less subject—or a not yet liberated subjectivity.”77 Despite the apparent lack of any definitively autonomous or progressive grounding of the ego, an ego existing in a non-repressive mediated relation with internal and external nature is foreshadowed in Adorno’s work: Were speculation concerning the state of reconciliation allowed, then it would be impossible to conceive that state as either the undifferentiated unity of subject and object or their hostile antithesis: rather it would be the communication of what is differentiated . . . The relationship of subject and object would lie in a peace achieved between human beings as


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well as between them and their Other. Peace is the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other.78

The preponderance of the object means comprehension not only of its reality, but also of the potential of the object and missed opportunity. The utopian thread that runs throughout Adorno’s work can be understood in this light. Since all thinking takes the cognitive form of identify thinking, the definition of the subject must turn in against itself for the sake of the subject.79 This moment of self-reflection must avoid the temptation toward aggression, characteristic of non-reflective instrumental reason. Instead, Adorno sees self-reflection as an act of love: the capacity to see the similar in the dissimilar, the acceptance of the other as other.80 Dialectics, as the unfolding of the particular and universal mediated by the universal, unravels the phantasm of totality; contradiction changes not only the identity of a thing but the nonidentical as well. In Adorno’s thought experience is not a standpoint. Experience consumes the immuring of the subject within the identical. Philosophy operates on this dialectic, avoiding the vertiginous collapse into an idealist void. The undialectical moment within thought is continuity, and is given to experience through concepts. For this reason philosophy must be “intratemporal” as opposed to linear.81 Dialectics must reflect the motion of the subject-object dialectic and such reflections can only be negative.82 Adorno attempts to theorize this relation with the strictest attention to the concept, exposing the way in which the social system as a whole is revealed in the particular details: music, art, the commodity form, and so on. Adorno’s aim is to place fragmented insights in a constellation which illuminate the falsity of the whole, a disintegrative ethic which corrodes power and authority from within its own contrary dimensions. This can only be accomplished if the object is assigned primacy over the subject, since the more the subject forgets that it is object, the more reified consciousness becomes. Insofar as nonidentity is the telos of identity, Adorno’s negative dialectics can be understood as a critical theory of recognition, “exact imagination.”83 The recognition of the nonidentical within identity is an attempt to distinguish the way the subject is part of the object and the way the object is different; the apprehension of the other includes something of the self in that very process but is also nonidentical with this very insight. In this sense, negative dialectics is a radically intersubjectivist theory. Although Adorno did not perceive recognition explicitly in terms of communicative relations as Habermas does, it is evident that he shied away from formulating the problem in this way precisely because it presupposes an independence of the

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individual from nature and collapses the distinction between language and the concept. Linguistic theory also ascribes to the positivistic literalness of language, an undialectical polarizing of the rhetorical fluidity of language in alignment with classificatory thinking. For Adorno, such literalness separates language from experience.84 Likewise, the separation of the individual from nature presupposes a separation of society from nature, a dichotomy that Adorno finds problematic insofar as conceptual thought and identity thinking contain a capsule of undifferentiated mythic thought. As discussed in Horkheimer’s work, and elaborated further in Marcuse’s work, recognition is a process that requires the use of imagination, an aesthetic sense as much as a creativity that is unrealistic or imaginary enough to uncouple the rigid dynamics of social repression. Adorno’s concept of an “exact imagination” is revealing for a theory of recognition that cannot be reduced to the terms of a communicative theory. EROS AND CIVILIZATION: A BRIEF INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT OF HERBERT MARCUSE In an adjoining essay to Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Herbert Marcuse’s “Philosophy and Critical Theory” (1937) proclaimed the significance of emancipation, happiness, and social transformation, themes that are central throughout his work. As with Horkheimer, Marcuse expresses a disavowal of an unmediated link between theory and practice, writing: “The subsequent construction of the new society cannot be the object of theory, for it is to occur as the free creation of the liberated individuals.”85 This notion, which is a definitive characteristic of critical theory, came to be known as Marcuse’s “great refusal.” The fundamental category for philosophy, Marcuse notes, is reason, a critical category which brings together the apprehension of existence alongside the highest potentials of humankind. The essence of reason is freedom: “Freedom is the formal element of rationality, the only form in which reason can be.”86 Outside the human potential for freedom, Marcuse maintains that all judgments are meaningless. He further pursues this theme with regard to the relation between truth and rationality, indicating that truth and freedom belong together: the subject who thinks within a “horizon of untruth” is barred from the door to real emancipation.87 Marcuse argues that because of the reality of unfreedom the abyss between rational and present reality might only be bridged in connection with the speculations of fantasy, imagination (Marcuse does not analytically distinguish between the two).


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Imagination, Marcuse argues, has a considerable degree of independence from the given, thus surpassing what is present through the anticipation of a possible future. The danger is that imagination is able to cognize almost anything, whereas critical theory recognizes only possible realities.88 Thus, despite the emphatic and rigorous rationality of critical theory, it does not dispense with fantasy as a form of resistance to an unfree world, recognizing that the free play of the imagination coincides with actual freedom. Marcuse’s early emphasis on imagination would go on to shape much of the rest of his intellectual life, especially his writings on social theory and psychoanalysis and art. Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, one of his most celebrated works, can be seen as intimately related to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Marcuse sets out to investigate why “intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified unfreedom” by addressing the question of why revolutionary consciousness continuously fails to develop.89 In doing so he articulates the political and sociological substance of psychoanalytic categories, providing a philosophical rejoinder, a philosophy of psychoanalysis, to Freud’s theses regarding renunciation and civilization. In comparison to Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse explores the possibility of a nonrepressive society in greater detail. A nonrepressive society is a concept of society that is not based on utopian speculation but is grounded in concrete and historical forms of existing relations. While Marcuse remains a theorist who is steadfast in extolling the power of negativity, he might also be characterized as the most affirmative of the Frankfurt School theorists as well. Liberation, Marcuse maintains, is dialectical: the stronger oppression grows, the “more negative and more utopian” thought must be.90 In contemporary society, Marcuse maintains that freedom has become the freedom to repress the need for the liberation of human beings, a freedom manifest in the union of productivity and destruction. In terms of ideology, this means that freedom and servitude have become naturalized, appearing as facts of nature rather than mediated products of the nature-culture dialectic. According to the prevailing understanding of reason, freedom is spuriously identified as embodiment and exploitation, with both thought to be necessary aspects of social and psychological life and experience. Critical theorizing, “which comes to the question of the truth and universality of happiness in the elucidation of the concepts with which it seeks to determine the rational form of society,” explores the mental basis for domination and exploitation wherein the individual, itself already a product of culture, has been reduced to a lifeless commodified body within an apparently indifferent social machine.91

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Along with Horkheimer and Adorno, who seek to bring reason into a reflective relation against itself, Marcuse also remains indebted to Hegel’s dialectic. In Reason and Revolution Marcuse affirms Hegel’s primary thought: “All things are contradictory in themselves.”92 He also reminds us that the “unhealing wound” of reason against itself might be healed by the weapon which created it, although he is quick to point out this has not yet found validation in history.93 Marcuse argues that it is possible to achieve today what had hitherto been identified as utopian, however distorted and repressive modern society is. He is emphatic that a nonrepressive civilization is possible, upholding the idea that there is a subversive potential in sensuality and sexuality as life-affirming Eros.94 While Marcuse’s work is often criticized for positing a biologically conditioned utopia (Habermas), this critique misses the subtlety of Marcuse’s position.95 Marcuse explicitly asserts that the aims of the instincts are thoroughly historical, mutable and, following Freud, essentially plastic, subject to near infinite variation; contingent as opposed to metaphysical. Capturing this point, Russell Jacoby remarks: “The ‘sub-individual and pre-individual factors’ that define the individual belong to the realm of the archaic and biological; but it is not a question of pure nature. Rather it is second nature: history that has hardened into nature.”96 It would be a mistake, then, to say that Marcuse deploys a solely biologically determined understanding of Eros as potentially liberative, since such an assumption would require a definitive separation of the individual from nature, and nature from culture. Marcuse comprehends Eros and emancipation as potential achievements of living creatures within history, as natural and historical beings.97 Contrary to Habermas’s claim that a theory of instincts is “theological,” by way of giving voice to a fundamentally non-discursive nature, Marcuse’s understanding of “a sensuous rationality” amplifies what a rational and biological creature needs in terms of political freedom, a political freedom that is not limited to abstract notions of toleration or expression and a freedom that cannot be coherently understood as anything but thoroughly historical. What Marcuse calls a theory of instincts is part of a wider social theory aiming at the enrichment of the subject by critically enlarging the spectrum of experience and memory. Accordingly, instinctual drives cannot be located outside of history, even if the utopian realization of human potential is cryptically identified as “timeless”98 As indicated in the subtitle of Eros and Civilization, Marcuse treats Freud’s psychological categories as political categories and notes that psychology is always social philosophy. The return of the repressed, as Marcuse argues, is the subterranean history of civilization.99 Although Freud considered subjugation an inevitable and irreversible part of social existence, the


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overtaking of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, Marcuse outlines a critical distinction between repression and surplus repression, and, between the reality principle and the performance principle.100 This critically accounts for an ambiguity in Freud’s work. For Marcuse, Freud’s revolutionary insight is this: “the conflict that is decisive for the fate of civilization is that between the reality of repression and the almost equally real possibility of doing away with repression, between the increase of Eros necessary for civilization and the equally necessary suppression of its claims for pleasure.”101 According to Marcuse, repression, in the most basic sense, refers to the “modification” of the instincts. Repression differs in scope and degree according to varying forms of social production embodied in a system of societal institutions and relations.102 In agreement with Freud, Marcuse argues that some degree of repression is necessary for civilization, but he also argues that surplus repression is a repression that is in excess of the level necessary to sustain existing social forms. Underlying excessive forms of repression is scarcity. Scarcity is a social phenomenon and cannot be explained in purely anthropological or psychological terms. It has to do with the organization and imposition of distribution in a hierarchical social system and it is “fallacious in so far as it applies to the brute fact of scarcity” and “actually is the consequence of a specific organization of scarcity, and of a specific existential attitude enforced by this organization.”103 Surplus repression is therefore a form of domination that is not operative simply from above, but operates most effectively from within, and is for this reason virtually invisible. To further his argument, Marcuse innovatively relates the idea of repression to the performance principle as the prevailing historical form of the reality principle. The significance of the performance principle is that it entails the idea that the reality principle is not constant, since it does not emerge in an identical way at all times. The reality principle supersedes the pleasure principle in a specific way, through the surrender of momentary and uncertain pleasure for a restrained but assured pleasure. However, the reality principle enforces a change not only in the form and timing of pleasure but in its very substance. The adjustment of pleasure to the reality principle implies the subjugation and diversion of the destructive force of instinctual gratification, of its incompatibility with the established societal norms and relations, and, by that token, implies the transubstantiation of pleasure itself.104

Thus, the organization of the ego and the development of the function of reason has to do with the existing organization of society. The conceptual

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move that facilitates Marcuse’s Hegelian-Marxian rethinking of Freud is in his pinpointing of Marx’s idea of material scarcity with Freud’s notion of necessity. Whereas Freud suggests that scarcity is an inevitable condition, Marcuse argues that “necessity” is a social condition created by repressive forces. This is why Marcuse makes a distinction between repression and surplus repression, noting that this is more consistent with the spirit of Freud’s work while also being illustrative of Freud’s failure to provide a distinction between necessary and unnecessary repression. The distinction supports the possibility of objective standards between repression that are more or less unavoidable in the process of human development and domination, an excess of repression that is socially and political imposed, meaningless, and wholly unnecessary.105 Through the imposition of the reality principle, the division of labor along with other social restrictions, the subject is severed and alienated from her or his needs. Marcuse notes, human beings “do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions.”106 Since human instincts are mutable, and therefore intimately historical, the overtaking of the pleasure principle by the reality principle in its existing form paradoxically brings about the advent of the rational subject. The subject as it exists now is therefore not the only possible form of rationality that human beings might possess.107 What Freud calls the reality principle is not ultimate reality, even if this reality is presented to the subject as autonomous fate; rather, it is constitutive of the inner antagonism of psychical life, the place where freedom and necessity collide amidst a specific and historical constellation of the forces of production which have reduced freedom to a technique.108 This does not mean that Marcuse is at odds with the rational form of the performance principle, since he maintains that its internal logical is consistent. What Marcuse is concerned with is the substantive irrationality of the performance principle: it is the social system that is irrational, in the sense that it produces misery and exploitation. Suffering should not be taken to signify personal failure or individual incompetence, but must be seen in terms of its holistic or totalitarian features. In late capitalism this truth has become subterranean, buried beneath thick layers of repression and cultural introjection. Reification stands in accord with the authoritarian idea that what exists now must necessarily exist in this particular way. Under the weight of varying forms of domination, the subject suffers a traumatic loss of memory, what Jacoby calls “social amnesia” and the internalization of guilt. When all of the forces of production have been assembled against the subject that should be free, not even thoughts and memories are safe. Amidst excessive repression memory, the act of restoring what has been forgotten, becomes a source of critical and emancipatory power. If, as Freud notes, all


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history is a history of repression, then, as Marcuse indicates, the reality principle is governed by the historical sedimentation of that which has been forgotten. The remembering is therefore a vital task of critical theorizing.109 The restoration of memory is not only a recollection of the social basis of domination, but is also a recalling of the non-traumatic, the pleasurable or euphoric history of the subject, the “tabooed aspirations of humanity,” and experiences of gratification. In this sense, memory is both cognitive and therapeutic. The recollection of the past brings to consciousness the potentialities and promises that have been betrayed.110 However, Marcuse is aware that the recovery of memory cannot itself be equated with liberation; truth is only a condition of freedom and should not be mistaken for actual liberation.111 The maintenance of mutilated human reality depends on the legitimation of obsolescent necessity and surplus repression mediated by second nature. If this is the case, then a critical consciousness must embody both the awareness of historical amnesia and the beginnings of a transformed sensibility: cognition is a necessary but not sufficient condition for liberation. The liberation of the subject that Marcuse envisions is not only a liberated subject, free from alienation and unnecessary suffering, but a subject that experiences a transformed understanding of our human experience. Marcuse speculates, for instance, that without thick layers of repression our experience of historical time may perhaps shift from a linear to non-linear field as a consequence of utopian realization.112 In a world without domination, everyday experiences, our sense perception and means of apprehending reality would be transformed. The internal struggle for liberation, Marcuse argues, is a struggle of life and death, a struggle between Eros and Thanatos. Although many aspects of Freud’s understanding of the death instinct are problematic, Marcuse reads Freud’s notion of the death instinct as socially directed. It is not that Thanatos possesses an autonomous functioning within the psyche, such as a biological urge towards the death of the subject, rather, the death instincts are elastic and governed by an inertia seeking the relief of tension. The form of such relief is defined according to its direction, which is susceptible to historical intervention and can potentially be put to use in the service of Eros.113 The destructive or sadistic expressions of the death instinct are not exhaustive of its functioning. Aggression, for instance, is a by-product of the restricted sexual logic of late capitalism and can reasonably be harnessed in favor of self-preservation and human welfare, the intolerance of violence and injustice, for example.114 In addition to the vital retrieval of memory, even if this memory itself is a product of ideological distortion, Marcuse seeks to recover a spirit of

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utopianism, what he otherwise designates as “polymorphous perversity.”115 For Marcuse, our recollection of the past must also be a recollection of an ideological past with its own potentials. This recollection of an ideological past must be distinguished from historical and existing potentials. Marcuse argues that this twofold task is made possible through the power of fantasy and the imagination, since fantasy is precisely what escapes the reality principle and it is through fantasy that the remembrance of missed opportunities must be accomplished.116 Marcuse accords fantasy and imagination the cognitive capacity to bridge the gap between history and ideology by merit of its resistance to the precepts of conventional reality.117 Within the cognitive vicissitudes of art, for instance, Marcuse detects a history that late capitalism longs to forget. He writes: “Phantasy plays a most decisive function in the total mental structure: it links the deepest layers of the unconscious with the highest products of consciousness (art), the dream with the reality; it preserves the archetypes of the genus, the perpetual but repressed ideas of the collective and individual memory, the tabooed images of freedom.”118 Marcuse’s analysis also outlines the way in which all the existing forces of production have been marshaled against human freedom and happiness: “civilization is still conditioned by archaic mental immaturity.”119 This immaturity is marked by a qualitative advance in rationality, the idea that existence could be pacified, but also a regression, the objective enslavement of the masses. In light of this, Marcuse seeks to rekindle the potential of rational thought to negate the narrow confines of reason assessed in terms of efficiency and consistency, and the existing forms of rationalization that currently side with an interest in domination. A more substantive understanding of reason includes not only an aesthetic imagination, but a critical element that does not assimilate human potential with blind determination.120 The following passage, dealing with reification and the automatization of the ego, from the essay “Freedom and Freud’s Theory of Instincts,” densely summarizes Marcuse’s view: According to Freudian instinct theory, the reality principle works primarily through the processes that occur between the id, the ego, and the superego, between the unconscious, the conscious, and the outside world. The ego, or rather the conscious part of the ego, fights a battle on two fronts, against the id and against the outside world, with frequently shifting alliances. Essentially, the struggle centers on the degree of instinctual freedom to be allowed and the modifications, sublimations, and repressions to be carried out. The conscious ego plays a leading role in this struggle. The decision is really its decision; it is, at least


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in the normal case of the mature individual, the responsible master of the psychic processes. But this mastery has undergone a crucial change. Franz Alexander pointed out that the ego becomes ‘corporeal,’ so to speak, and that its reactions to the outside world and to the instinctual desires emerging from the id become increasing ‘automatic.’ The conscious processes of confrontation are replaced to an increasing degree by immediate, almost physical reactions in which comprehending consciousness, thought, and even one’s own feelings play a very small role. It is as though the free space which the individual has at his disposal for his psychic processes has been greatly narrowed down; it is no longer possible for something like an individual psyche with its own demands and decisions to develop; the space is occupied by public, social forces.121

With a view to resist the tendencies of domination toward the narrowing of psychic space, memory, and human potential, Marcuse argues for the transformation of human relations, accentuating the creative and critical aspects of rational life: art, fantasy, play, and beauty as cognitive elements of rational faculties. Art and the free play of imagination are necessarily aspects of rational life. Still, the contemporary industrial regime, Marcuse argues, is sustained through the internalization and reproduction of the performance principle. Anything that resembles fancy or possesses non-utilitarian features is to be eliminated as non-essential, through the use of coercion when necessary. The ongoing maintenance of domination is thus secured by repressive means, both internally and externally. Hence Marcuse’s distinction between repression and surplus repression is crucial. If the performance principle creates ideological scarcity as a means of ensuring the reproduction of its own hierarchical systems, then unleashing Eros could potentially bring about a radical change in the organization of society. Marcuse’s interest in happiness and freedom runs contrary to the vicious circle of sublimation and desexualization characteristic of the culture industry and the interests of domination and its auxiliary creation of mass psychology. This struggle, Marcuse notes, has much in common with Hegel’s struggle for recognition, which is a struggle regarding human desire, gratification, and the employment of a rationality that is not limited to instrumental or technical control.122 Some of the examples of domination that Marcuse draws on have to do with the decline of the father in family life, Prometheus’s performance principle, the idea that the son knows better, along with the celebration of an unhappy or tragic love rather than its inverse. To combat these tendencies, Marcuse draws on the power of art, the “great refusal” of theoretical criticism, and the creative and life-affirming

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power of fantasy. He highlights the figures of Orpheus and Narcissus as counter-hegemonic models that resist conventional conformity because their character traits have since come to be deemed as pathological. For Marcuse, these are aesthetic figures that refuse to accept separation from the libidinous object.123 Marcuse’s rekindling of an erotic rationality is linked with the possibility of art instead of industry, beauty instead of death, a sensuous reason instead of performance principle, and play instead of labor.124 These potentialities, he argues, are grounded in the possibility of an erotic love, the artistic “promesse de bonheur” of beauty, and are enjoined to a libidinal morality, a new sensuous rationality, what Marcuse also emphasizes has to do with the self-sublimation of sexuality rather than its fragmentation and destruction.125 Marcuse’s idea of the self-sublimation of sexuality, which is very much at the centre of his thought, amounts to a transformation of sexuality into Eros. Marcuse writes, No longer used as a full-time instrument of labor, the body would be resexualized. The regression involved in this spread of the libido would first manifest itself in a reactivation of all erotogenic zones and, consequently, in a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality and in a decline of genital supremacy. The body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed—an instrument of pleasure. This change in the value and scope of libidinal relations would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal families.126

Marcuse’s erotic utopia, which is really an “end of utopia,” posits a rationality that takes into consideration its own biologically and historically mediated possibility. This thesis can be and often has been read in two problematic ways. If one places an emphasis on the biological, Marcuse’s speculations will seem vulnerable to the charge of being metaphysical. If an accent is placed on the historical, then Marcuse’s thought threatens to be a new form of Marxian historicism. This is not an antagonism that Marcuse shies away from. In Marcuse, liberation is a paradox, deliberately so. Marcuse’s thesis is emphatic. If all the forces of production have been launched against human freedom and happiness, only the most exaggerated and provocative “revolt” will suffice. Richard Bernstein characterizes Marcuse’s thought as “perverse, wild, phantasmal and surrealistic” to which he further adds, “I am not using these adjectives in a pejorative, but in a descriptive sense.”127 In brief, Marcuse seeks to elucidate what is at stake in the existing political struggle conceived as both psychical and social. Struggling against abstract


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notions of existentialism, wherein freedom is considered mental freedom alone, Marcuse’s stress on the instincts and the erotic is a radical philosophical intervention. CONCLUDING REMARKS As Horkheimer announced, the tasks of critical theory include the articulation of an epistemological theory concerned with the possible conditions of knowledge, a radical and rational account of existing forms of domination, an analysis of the mechanisms that sustain and reproduce domination, and the mapping out of the implications of domination for the subject and society. For the critical theorist, insight into the psychological constitution of the individual does not preclude insight into the social totality in which the individual is situated. If the instincts are malleable, insight into the individual psyche also entails insight into the way in which society operates. Freud’s theory of the drives is used within critical theory to unveil the chimera of a fully developed autonomous ego, a misapprehension to which enlightened thought tends to be especially vulnerable. Instead of positing an autonomous ego, which would inevitably end up glorifying existing forms of domination as necessary, the Frankfurt School theorists argue that bourgeois individuality has become increasingly pronounced in the form of narcissism and is simultaneously suffering from a massive collapse, with the private regression of the ego into the id under the sway of public forms of domination and social organization.128 Despite the dire observations of the critical theorists, the image of utopian possibility is never very far from their thoughts. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse each anticipate the possibility of reconciliation. The dialectic of negativity, however, is not teleological, and in each case the Weltanschauung present in social philosophy and psychoanalysis is neither cast aside nor lamented. Each of the sections presented contribute to the thematic emphasis of my argument. In particular, I have raised some of the most salient points that must be critically rethought but also critically appropriated for a contemporary critical social theory, especially in light of Habermas’s extensive assessment of their respective strengths and weaknesses. Horkheimer’s critique of traditional theory, Adorno’s working out of the philosophical logic of the preponderance of the object, and Marcuse’s sensuous rationality all bring to bear a number of issues that, to my mind, have received too little attention in the aftermath of Habermas’s influential criticisms. In particular, I wish to highlight the significance of the imaginary as a category within the writings of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. Although not thematized directly,

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fantasy and the imaginary have multi-faceted roles in their work, a utopian dimension and a dimension that sides with domination; dreams and desires can be progressive forces, as forms of negation, and regressive, harnessed and exploited in the form of “ideologies of desire.” The largely unexplored dynamics of the imaginary speak to the relevance of a theoretical consideration of imagination for critical theory. The desirability and advantage of having such a theory will become relevant in the following chapters. In the next chapter I will provide an assessment of the early critical theory of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas’s project is important for theorists interested in the Frankfurt School because of his sustained critique of the adequacy of the subject-object dialectic. His critique takes up the task of articulating a theory of intersubjectivity that requires the subject-object dialectic to be conceptualized anew. One might say that Habermas shifts Adorno’s “preponderance of the object” to the absolute primacy of social interaction. This is not to say that Habermas replaces the subject-object dialectic with a subject-subject dialectic, since this would collapse the insights of critical theory with a hypostatized understanding of subjectivity. However, the mainstay of Habermas’s theory argues for substantial revisions to many of the tenets of earlier critical theory: the relation of human interest to instincts, the relation of hermeneutics and psychoanalysis and the concept of reification, which Habermas reformulates as a theory of systematically distorted communication. Each of these reformulations on the part of Habermas are accomplished through his critique of the limitations of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. For this reason it is necessary to carefully consider precisely those points which may have been glossed over quickly.

Chapter Two

Knowledge, Interests, Nature: Jürgen Habermas’ Early Writings

Jürgen Habermas’s 1965 inaugural address, “Knowledge and Human Interests,” initiated a radical critique of knowledge, a project that was intended to have sweeping implications for epistemology.1 Arguing that the sciences and social sciences have become estranged from their legitimate tasks, Habermas attempts to situate questions of epistemology within the realm of genuine human interests. This task is all the more urgent because the separation of knowledge from human interests has not only led the sciences further and further into the delusion of disinterested contemplation, the snare of positivism and historicism, but also granted privilege to instruction in control over emancipation by means of enlightenment.2 The concept of knowledge free from human interests, Habermas argues, is an ideological remnant of idealism, privileging an instrumental attitude toward all things at the expense of practical concerns and desires. With a new orientation toward enlightenment, it is hoped that the unity of rational investigation and human interest can transform the illegitimate severing of knowledge from interest and thereby assist in the realization of a society free from domination. This critical-theoretical project announced in 1965 found its initial formulation in Habermas’s On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967) and Knowledge and Human Interests (1968). As part of the task of addressing the crisis of knowledge, Habermas argues that phenomenological reflection must reconstruct its own genesis from sense certainty through the successive stages of the appearance of consciousness to the stages of self-reflective critique. In setting out to accomplish this task he argues that theoretical analysis must do justice to our linguistic constitution, indicating that the specific viewpoints from which we apprehend reality have their basis in labor and social interaction, the concrete manifestations of human interests in objective form. Moving beyond what he sees to be the 41

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failures in Kant, Hegel, and Marx, Habermas hopes to retrieve from the legacy of the Enlightenment “the abandoned stages of reflection” and thus rejuvenate the ideals found in the bourgeois emphasis on freedom, justice, and reason.3 The project can only be realized, Habermas claims, through the articulation of a comprehensive social theory.4 Arguing that there is a discernable relationship between three distinct theoretical attitudes and specific corresponding human interests, Habermas maintains that epistemological reflection requires a transformed understanding of a value-free notion of science and truth. Habermas’s concept of truth, in contrast to traditional epistemological notions of truth as a reflection of reality, is developed in terms of a discursive concept of validity. Under the sway of an objectivist illusion, traditional theory attempted to establish a mirror-like correspondence between theoretical statements and objective reality. This conception ignores the way in which objective reality is constituted for consciousness through the socializing and individuating medium of language. Thus, it is not the mirror of reality that theory should seek, but the consensus of a community of investigators who have taken up objectivating attitudes through their linguistic claims. This basic idea is at the centre of Habermas’s theoretical claims regarding the relation between knowledge and human interests. Habermas outlines his general theoretical framework as follows: There are three categories of processes of inquiry for which a specific connection between logical-methodological rules and knowledge-constitutive interests can be demonstrated. This demonstration is the task of a critical philosophy of science that escapes the snares of positivism. The approach of the empirical-analytic sciences incorporates a technical cognitive interest; that of the historical-hermeneutic sciences incorporates a practical one; and the approach of critically oriented sciences incorporates the emancipatory cognitive interests that . . . was at the root of traditional theories.5

The distinction between three kinds of human interests is accompanied by five theses. Although Habermas’s later work amends each of these claims in various ways, his five statements are exemplary in terms of his thematic interests to date and, in the most general sense, remain representative of his basic theoretical orientation: 1. 2.

The achievements of the (quasi)transcendental subject have their basis in the natural history of the human species.6 Knowledge serves as an instrument that transcends mere self-preservation.7

Knowledge, Interests, Nature 3. 4. 5.

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Knowledge-constitutive interests take form in the media of work, language, and power.8 In the power of self-reflection, knowledge and interest are one.9 The unity of knowledge and interest proves itself in a dialectic that takes the historical traces of suppressed dialogue and reconstructs what has been suppressed.10

THE THREE HUMAN INTERESTS Habermas argues that the three human interests are invariant, in the sense of being necessarily grasped as such for the effective and successful reproduction of the species, and can therefore be understood as quasi-transcendental even when an interest itself is particular and contingent.11 Habermas defines interests as “basic orientations rooted in specific, fundamental conditions of the possible reproduction and self-constitution of the species.” These interests are “a function of the objectively constituted problems of the preservation of life that have been solved by the cultural form of existence as such.”12 He further maintains these interests can be formalized in terms of a theoretical orientation and investigated according to specific methodological principles. Accordingly, the three interests are constitutive of the distinct cognitive orientations that human beings take up: an interest in accurate knowledge about objects and knowledge about how to control the external environment; an interest in the understanding of meaning; and an interest in emancipation, critical self-reflection. Critical self-reflection, in Kantian fashion, is tied to the subjective capacity for progressively minded normgoverned behavior. The uncovering of the emancipatory knowledge-constitutive interest establishes a substantial link between separate and distinct forms of scientific knowledge and social coordination. The aim in understanding interest structures as cultural-anthropological and cognitive-epistemological is an attempt to bypass two difficulties: the problem of a strictly transcendental subject and the problem of behaviorism. To accomplish this, Habermas theorizes the desublimation of the a priori and transcendental categories in Kant, without engendering the subject within a frame of evolutionary determinism, by reading technical and practical cognitive interests as characteristics of the evolutionary structures of the life of the species, such that they lose their transcendental status and predetermined abstract nature. This approach marks a shift out of “Kantian” philosophy of consciousness into a “Hegelian” philosophical anthropology. In this way the assertion of

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an emancipatory interest as a self-reflective interest frees subjectivity from the confines of determinism. The emancipatory interest takes the form of self-reflective inquiry and is understood as an inherent property of language-use oriented by the attempt to critically understand and evaluate something, bringing immediately to mind Horkheimer’s “critical attitude.” It is argued that the emancipatory interest, grasped only intuitively in traditional theory, is grounded in a commitment to liberation from pseudo-natural constraints whose ideological power resides in their non-transparency. Self-reflection as praxis does not collapse the distinction between practical and technical interests. Critical reflection, the idea of reason grasping itself as interested, is the harmonization and reconciliation of these two interests as one.13 Habermas’s understanding of the normative dimension of the emancipatory interest is a “partisanship in favor of reason.”14 In emancipatory praxis, morality and epistemology are unified, wherein correct norm-guided behavior becomes fused with correct knowledge. Likewise, this does not collapse the distinction between particular ethical-political situations and adherence to universal moral norms. The act of self-reflection is, in itself, simultaneously knowing and acting, a communicative force, and is at the heart of Habermas’s understanding of progressive enlightenment through reflection. To highlight the importance of a distinctly emancipatory interest by way of critique, Habermas argues that as long as theoretical analysis retains an emphasis on ontology, as opposed to the contingent sociality of the human species, “it is itself subject to an objectivism that disguises the connection of its knowledge with the human interest in autonomy and responsibility.”15 Ontology is problematic for Habermas because the implied objectivism of its substantial claims betrays confusion between two distinct modes of reasoning: instrumental and communicative. This confusion pays the price of rendering its interest structure invisible and suppresses the kind of self-reflective criticism that Habermas sees as vital for enlightened subjectivity. Ontology, in Habermas’s view, succumbs to a scientific form of moralism without acknowledging this to be the case. Habermas’s point is not that the questions and concerns of ontological inquiry are false, but that the achievements of first philosophy are unmediated, and for that reason cannot be adequately clarified within the bounds of a communicative community. The critical theory of society, Habermas argues, prompts critical reflection that embodies the link between the anthropological interests of human beings and epistemological claims in the domains of technical knowledge (objectivity) and practical knowledge (politics and ethics). Critical self-reflection is conceived as the bridge between theory and practice, “the self-reflection of science.”16

Knowledge, Interests, Nature

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Habermas understands the initial tendency toward critical reflection as an intuition and its potential realization as emancipation, the comprehension of and liberation from dependence: “only the ego that apprehends itself in intellectual intuition as the self-positing subject obtains autonomy.”17 Not unlike Kant, it is argued that the person who does not summon up the force to carry out critical reflection lives in a state of dependency: the subject “leads an unfree existence, because he does not become conscious of his self-reflective self-activity.”18 Determination without reflection, Habermas remarks, is both a “moral lack” and a “theoretical incapacity” adding, “that is why the idealist is in danger of scorning the dogmatist instead of enlightening him.”19 In summary, interests are intimately related to understanding mediated by language and are constitutive of our discovery and creation of knowledge about the external, internal, or social realm. Interests have a twofold place within Habermas’s theoretical schema, as cultural-anthropological and as cognitive-epistemological. To be sure, Habermas’s theoretical framework is set at a level of abstraction extending beyond a concept of interest as a specific empirical interest. THEORIZING THE BREAK WITH NATURE Habermas’s concept of human interests refers to knowledge-constitutive interests, interests that are mediated by the natural history of the human species within the logic of a self-formative process.20 Self-formative processes, such as socialization and individuation, are achievements accomplished through the media of labor and language. These interests derive from the dialectical struggle of nature and reason, labor and interaction, object and subject.21 The concept of human interests encapsulates the dialectical movement of self-reflection from natural inclination (nature) to a socially informed knowledge-constitutive interest (reason). Habermas thus takes up the categories of idealism and materialism with recourse to a philosophical anthropology, the conceptual apprehension of the natural history of the species. Interest structures are neither instruments of adaptation (behaviorism) nor acts of purely rational beings removed from the context of life in contemplation (idealism). Our interest and passions are always at our backs and are concretized in the lifeworld and are implicated with our motivations and attitudes towards others and ourselves. Habermas further notes that in reflection there arises a break with nature, a rupture between natural and social evolution that is inherent to the transcending interest of reason in reason itself. An emancipatory impulse, manifest as the liberation from opaque social relations, adheres to reason in

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the same way that language is inherent to social and cultural reproduction. Habermas identifies the uncovering of this communicative cultural resource, the transcending power of language, as manifesting in society as authentic moral progress. Self-reflection is the basis for enlightenment and progressive social change and is essential for the development of a socialized, individuated, and rational society. 22 According to Habermas, human interests derive both from nature and from the cultural transcendence of nature, manifest in the autonomy of reason. Interests are the means through which satisfaction of the natural drives are sought and the means for the realization of freedom from the constraints of nature and the blind terrors of self-preservation. When human interests are self-reflectively grasped, on a moral and cognitive level, Habermas argues that an irreversible rupture with nature occurs; civilization rises above the determination of human existence by the drive for self-preservation. This break is thought to raise us out of the realm of the causality of nature and mythic determination into the realm of autonomy, solidarity, and responsibility: [The] human interests that have emerged in man’s natural history . . . derive both from nature and from the cultural break with nature. Along with the tendency to realize natural drives they have incorporated the tendency toward release from the constraint of nature. Even the interest in self-preservation, natural as it seems, is represented by a social system that compensates for the lacks in man’s organic equipment and secures his historical existence against the force of nature threatening from without. But society is not only a system of self-preservation. An enticing natural force, present in the individual as libido, has detached itself from the behavioral system of self-preservation and urges toward utopian fulfillment. These individual demands, which do not initially accord with the requirement of collective self-preservation, are also absorbed by the social system. That is why the cognitive processes to which social life is indissolubly linked function not only as means to the reproduction of life; for in equal measure they themselves determine the definitions of this life. What may appear as naked survival is always in its roots a historical phenomenon. For it is subject to the criterion of what a society intends for itself as the good life.23

Habermas does make a differentiation between the causality of nature and the causality of fate. The causality of nature exists within the chaos of self-preservation. Transcendence from this realm is irreversible. Habermas conceives regression not as a reversion back to nature but a regression to the


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causality of fate. This occurs when language becomes petrified, attached to images and the imaginary; thus Habermas speaks of a return to mythology or a mythic “second nature.” Habermas also explains this phenomenon in terms of primitive linguistic contexts, where the medium of language has not yet been differentiated from immediacy. This is discussed in terms of the spellbinding power of language: language-use fused with images derived from specific contexts. This situation is understood as prescientific. Within a theoretical orientation language is freed from its context and is able to be used in a decontextualized way, free to objectify nature through a system of representation. It is here that we can locate the way in which Habermas sees communicative rationality as a sui generis phenomenon, prompting his remark that language is the transcendental medium through which humankind reproduces its life.24 Through communicative rationality, subjects achieve their autonomy when the initial context dependence of language is severed. The decontextualization that objectivating perspectives allow plays into Habermas’s understanding of the origin of language. When language is tied to images and contains a pictorial dimension he is not saying that language emerges out of a steady stream of images, rather, that language is returning to an archaic form, a second nature. Prelinguistic sense perception is undifferentiated and chaotic and has no relation to thing-representations. Images are mediated by experiences of social labor and specific sense perception contexts. The return of the contextualization of language, which Habermas grasps as regressive, is not a return to a prelinguistic situation of “the compulsion of nature,” but to the irrational compulsions of “superfluous authorities,” a break between the rational pursuit of human interests and dogmatism, stereotyped behavior.25 “The social force of repression, of instinctual renunciation under authority, is transformed into the psychological compulsion of unconsciously motivated actions.”26 Such compulsion is understood by Habermas to be quasi-natural, a domination that splits off transmitted meaning from free communication and “distorts it into a demonic force of nature.”27 LABOR AND INTERACTION Habermas views cultural reproduction as mediated by three different spheres: labor, language, and power. Of these three, what raises us moderns out of nature and into culture is language. In 1965 Habermas proposed that autonomy and solidarity taken together constitute the only Idea that we possess a priori: “Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus.”28 The idea of interest structures pertaining to

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language-use which eventually give way to self-reflective critique has its precursor in Kant and Fichte’s conceptions of pure reason. This kind of progressive reflection arises through intersubjective interactions where language serves as a medium of cultural reproduction and an instrumental steering mechanism for labor and power. The coordinating capacity of language oriented toward mutual understanding, the primary capacity of language, is what Habermas calls communicative action. Instrumental reason, in Habermas’s account, has a parasitic relation to the originary communicative use of language. The distinction that Habermas makes between instrumental and communicative reason is based on his distinction between labor and social interaction.29 The logic of these two forms of reason is considered to be quasitranscendental since they arise from the structures of human life and the everyday use of language.30 These invariant structures demarcate the objective distinction between technical, practical, and emancipatory orientations that human beings invariably take up in relation to the world. From an anthropological view, the Cartesian subject, which Kant understood to be the empty form of transcendental apperception and Hegel radicalized within an intersubjective frame, is replaced by the concept of species “that reproduces itself under cultural conditions.”31 In Habermas’s provocative interpretation of Hegel, he notes the experience of the “I” originates from the experience of interaction in which the “I” learns to see itself from the perspective of another subject. Self-consciousness, Habermas stresses, is the spontaneous derivation of the intersection of perspectives and is formed only on the basis of mutual recognition.32 Self-consciousness must be tied to the self being mirrored in the consciousness of another subject.33 Against Hegel, Habermas argues that it is not Spirit operating beneath subjectivity rather, Spirit can be comprehended as the medium of one “I” communicating with another “I” from which, as an absolute mediation, the two mutually form each other into subjects.34 Consciousness expressed in communication is the medium wherein subjects encounter each other. Habermas makes the point that language is the employment of symbols by the individual who confronts nature and gives names to things. The achievement of the symbolic is representation, a synthetic act encompassing naming and memory. Through symbols the speaking consciousness becomes objective for itself and in symbols experiences itself as subject. Language, then, must achieve a twofold mediation: resolving and preserving the perceived thing in a symbol which represents it, and the distancing of consciousness from its object. The mediation is the first category in which spirit is not conceived as something internal, but as a medium which is neither internal nor external.35


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In contrast to the coordinating medium of language, labor is the means for satisfying instincts. Just as language breaks with the immediate perception of chaos by sorting it into identifiable things, labor breaks the dictates of immediate instinctual demands and transforms the process of instinctual satisfaction. Like symbols in language, the instruments forming the laborers’ experience of their objects is also understood as a medium of learning and transformation: “The name is that which has permanence as against the ephemeral moments of the perceptions; in the same way, the tool is that which is general as against the ephemeral moments of desire and enjoyment.”36 The difference resides in the fact that instrumental rationality is monological, whereas communicative rationality is dialogical. According to Habermas, the dialectic of labor does not mediate between subject and object in the same manner as the dialectic of representation does. Labor begins not with the subjection of nature to self-generated symbols, but with the subjection of the subject to the power of external nature; labor entails the suspension of immediate instinctual satisfaction. In this respect Habermas notes that Hegel speaks of the subject making itself into a thing, “reifying itself ” in labor: “Labor is the this-worldly making oneself into a thing. The splitting up of the “I” existing in its drives is precisely this making oneself into an object.”37 Habermas maintains that the splitting up of the “I” existing in its drives is the splitting of the “I” into the reality testing ego and into repressed instinctual demands. By way of the subjection of oneself to the causality of nature in the activity of labor, consciousness returns back to itself as the cunning consciousness. Whereas the symbols of ordinary language penetrate and dominate the perceiving and thinking consciousness, the cunning consciousness controls the processes of nature by means of its tools: “The objectivity of language retains power over the subjective spirit, while the cunning that outwits nature extends subjective freedom over the power of objective spirit.”38 Summarizing how unity is achieved through the dialectic of labor and interaction, and the way in which relations of mutuality can become subject to relations of power, Habermas observes that Hegel introduces the employment of representational symbols as the first determination of abstract spirit, language. As part of cultural tradition, language enters into communicative action by means of everyday existence; only the intersubjectively valid and constant meanings which are drawn from tradition permit the orientation towards reciprocity. Thus, interaction constitutes communicative relations which have been established as parts of everyday life. Instrumental action, as social labor, is also embedded within a network of interactions, but instrumental action is dependent on the communicative relations within the

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lifeworld, conditions underlying social cooperation.39 Nevertheless, instrumental action, as technology, can produce reification when it replaces social relationships, thus marking the entrance of subjects into the causality of fate, second nature. Emancipation is the means by which labor enters into the norms under which we act complementarily.40 With regard to the relation between nature and language and nature and labor, Habermas argues that it was Marx who corrected Kant’s idealistic assumption that there is an immediate correspondence between reason and nature, theorizing the exchange with nature as one of social labor. It is within the praxis of social labor, Habermas contends, that all possible experience is constituted. This exchange is governed by interests determined within the communicative sphere. Labor facilitates a mediated experience of nature. This insight guides Habermas to the conclusion that there is no experience of “nature-in-itself,”41 further leading him to identify nature and history as separate.42 Habermas theorizes social labor as the primal context through which human beings first begin to internalize rules; labor is an essential part of the socialization process.43 This learning process lends itself to the accumulation of practical knowledge determining drives and shaping passions.44 This is how Habermas is able to theorize the distinction between language, labor, and power. Language is the sui generis medium of human existence and this medium is acquired through labor; when social processes become detached from human interests then reification occurs. CRITICAL SELFREFLECTION AND THE CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY Habermas outlines two forms of inquiry that are provisionally paradigmatic for emancipatory fields of inquiry: psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology. The former deals with intrapsychic disturbances brought on by deformations in socialization and individuation from within, while the latter deals with structural and institutional bases of power affecting communicative patterns from without. In On the Logic of the Social Sciences and Knowledge and Human Interests psychoanalysis is read as a theory of linguistic analysis and as a radical version of the Marxian concept of ideology critique.45 Habermas argues that psychoanalysis is unique among the disciplines because it is representative of a theoretically sound and practical endeavor implicitly appealing to the ideal of undistorted speech and capable of reversing and correcting individual and socially motivated pathologies and distortions in language: it is a paradigm of critical science and critical self-reflection through dialogue. According to Habermas, psychoanalysis is an exemplary


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discipline for critical theory because Freud was able to detect, analyze, and correct distortions in the linguistic medium, dreams provide an example of such distortions. Dreams, including day’s residues, dream-thoughts, and bodily stimuli, are understood to signify phenomena brought about by formative social processes and such scenes are open to psychoanalytic inquiry insofar as they have meaning at all. Through the capacity of the psychoanalyst to identify causal linguistic relations and identify the means and conditions for emancipatory practice, Habermas interprets Freud’s thought as a meta- or depth-hermeneutic model, illustrating empirically and self-reflectively the coincidence of a theoretical logic of inquiry and communicative practice wherein knowledge, self-reflection, and human interest coincide. Habermas sees psychoanalysis as a critical form of investigation and practice that unites theory and practice, thereby providing a means for liberation from dogmatic dependence and ideological distortion. In general, it can be said that Habermas rehabilitates the idea of a “psychoanalytic cure” by envisioning psychoanalytic insight as a form of ideology critique. Drawing on categories developed by Dilthey (linguistic elements, action patterns, and expressions), Habermas revises Freud’s theoretical framework from the viewpoint of a theory of language. Following the work of Alfred Lorenzer, Habermas theorizes that linguistic analysis takes symptoms and deciphers unconscious motives present in them just as a meaning suppressed by censorship can be reconstructed from corrupt passages and gaps in a text. In so doing, it transcends the dimension of the subjectively intended meaning of intentional action. It steps back from language as a means of communication and penetrates the symbolic level in which subjects deceive themselves about themselves through language and simultaneously give themselves away. As soon as language is excluded from public communication by repression, it reacts with a complementary compulsion, to which consciousness and communicative action bend as to the force of a second nature.46

For Habermas, the criterion of normalcy resides in the unity of speaking and acting. Transgressions of behavioral norms are possible indications of pathology. When there is an incongruity between speech and action it is necessary to translate interior motives, which manifest as compulsions to act, into intentions guided by human interests. Pathological distortions occur due to the repression of desire, the symptoms of which are theorized as rigid adherences to stereotypes rather than reflective thought. According to Lorenzer, “unconscious materials are in certain circumstances released by

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the unconscious to be absorbed and assimilated by the perceiving ego. The dream symbol, for example, is the product of an ‘inner’ perception which assimilates this almost inaccessible material.”47 As a means of correcting distortions in social life, Habermas argues that psychoanalysis demonstrates the unity of all three of these interests in the process of reflection guided by theoretical knowledge: the instrumental techniques of psychoanalysis inform us about competences, competences inform us about distortions in agreement, and agreement serves to validate the success of the technique.48 For Habermas, psychoanalysis, interpreted through a theory of language, is a critical and self-reflective discipline with the potential to reach behind the back of communicative distortions while at the same time providing a theoretical reconstruction of ideal communicative relations. Habermas argues that Freud implicitly relies on an ideal of undistorted speech within the analytic situation. Habermas abides by this ideal by making it explicit and then seeks to provide a rational justification for it in order to provide critical theory with a normative basis. The guiding ideal of undistorted communication and Habermas’s reconstructive approach remain constant throughout his work. The ideal is captured in a variety of expressions throughout his writings: communication free from constraint, the unlimited communicative community, the ideal speech situation, unbounded communication, communication free from distortion, undistorted speech, undamaged intersubjectivity, and so on. AFTER KNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN INTERESTS Habermas originally grounded his defense of human interests in a philosophical anthropology. This grounding was eventually supplemented by a “formal pragmatic” approach couched in more deeply within a theory of language than a philosophical anthropology. In Habermas’s later work, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), his understanding of reconciliation is similar to his earlier work, but is marked by a distinct change in emphasis and explanation: A subjectivity that is characterized by communicative reason resists the denaturing of the self for the sake of self-preservation. Unlike instrumental reason, communicative reason cannot be subsumed without resistance under a blind self-preservation. It refers neither to a subject that preserves itself in relating to objects via representation and action, nor to a self-maintaining system that demarcates itself from an environment, but to a symbolically structured lifeworld that is constituted in


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the interpretive accomplishments of its members and only reproduced through communication. Thus communicative reason does not simply encounter ready-made subjects and systems; rather, it takes part in structuring what is to be preserved. The utopian perspective of reconciliation and freedom is ingrained in the conditions for the communicative sociation of individuals; it is built into the linguistic mechanism of the reproduction of the species.49

Whereas in Habermas’s early work he attributes utopian longing to the libido, he argues in his later work that utopian longing is grounded in the performative aspects of the linguistic constitution of the species. This is precisely where a shift is most evident. Instead of locating a desire for emancipation in the historically conditioned libido, Habermas shifts to a utopian perspective ingrained solely in the structure of communication.50 This transition is decisive in my view. This alteration in Habermas’s perspective occurs because of the range of criticisms leveled against Habermas’s analyses in Knowledge and Human Interests. These criticisms led him to slowly rework his earlier approach, which was largely methodological and epistemological, in terms of a broader theory of communication with ties to speech act theory. After 1971 Habermas ceases to articulate the idea of human interests as knowledge-constitutive and begins to theorize such interest structures as performative attitudes manifest in the way in which human beings communicate with one another. Instead of a socio-anthropological interest, Habermas argues that these orientations are ontogenetic: structural and pragmatic.51 He makes this shift in order to avoid the uncomfortable position of having to justify a transcendental anthropology and the idea of transcendental reflection.52 As indicated, the shift from a concern with epistemology and methodology to a formal pragmatic argument addresses concerns about the invariant or quasi-transcendental interest structures first identified as a priori but which Habermas now attends to in pragmatic yet pluralistic terms. Through a reinterpretation of the Kantian notion of an a priori as an “always already’” pragmatic presupposition of language use, and looking to Austin and Searle’s theory of speech acts and the presuppositions of communication, Habermas situates interest structures directly within the linguistic constitution of the species. He does this in order to avoid problems pertaining to his independent grounding of the emancipatory interest. As Thomas McCarthy notes, Habermas’s emancipatory interest appeared too much to be an awkward reformulation of disinterested reason.53 Habermas re-theorized the idea of an emancipatory interest by collapsing self-reflective criticism into the logic

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of argumentation. Whereas in Habermas’s early work he draws on an almost Marcusean anthropological schema, the guiding ideal of reconciliation in his later work appears not as a human interest but as an anticipatory feature of communication theorized in the form of a universal or formal pragmatic argument. In short, Habermas saw that leaving an emancipatory interest outside of practical interests was redundant, since it is already immanent in the practical-communicative relation. Habermas revised the emancipatory interest to be a derivative of technical and practical interests as well as being immanent to these interests; recognizing that an interest in freedom and solidarity was incoherent as a unique and analytically distinguishable interest. While the motivation and substance of critical self-reflection is filled in by the content of technical and practical reason, Habermas also saw emancipatory reflection as the very form of such endeavors. The emancipatory interest is secondary and parasitic in the sense that technical and practical uses of reason guide critical reflection, yet it is primary in the sense that such uses of reason rely on the immanent notion of undistorted communication, the coordination of action in a congruous way. The bind that Habermas found himself in pertained to the methodological-epistemological approach he had developed to this point. By shifting his focus further toward a theory of language after Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas became more prone to speak of generalizable interests which are derivatives of specific kinds of speech acts, and hidden interests that are concealed by power and ideology.54 Generalizable interests are those interests that reflect issues and concerns that are open to rational consensus. Non-generalizable interests are private, and do not admit of possible discursive redemption.55 Private rationality, Habermas notes, entails that human interests are tangled within distorted patterns of communication.56 Although this gradual shift is evident almost immediately after the publication of Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas’s most evocative argument can be found in his 1976 essay “What is Universal Pragmatics?”57 In this essay Habermas argues that in speaking we take up a series of performative attitudes toward the world and others. Such performative attitudes, manifest in linguistic utterances, can be thematically differentiated and formulated in propositional form. In brief, a proposition is an illocutionary statement that links what we say with what we do, and is justifiable in the form of a validity claim tested by participants in an argumentative discourse in terms of truth or rightness. Habermas outlines a tripartite orientation: an orientation toward objects, other subjects, and an attitude toward ourselves. The task of a universal or formal pragmatics is to outline and justify


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the normative basis of communicative performances. This can be done, it is argued, in the case of truth and rightness. Habermas claims that it is theoretically possible to outline the normative basis of scientific and ethical-legal norms and reconstruct rules or guidelines for the justification and application of corresponding claims in a rational way. Rationality here refers to the way in which our actions and guiding norms are harmonized consistently. Justification for this program requires a theory of argumentation, which now serves as one of the centerpieces of Habermas’s critical theory. The difference between early and late Habermas can be summarized as follows. One of the key problems that Habermas encountered in his earlier work was the problem of how to account for the idea of a universal interest in knowledge as an a priori idea without a transcendental anthropology. As it turns out, Habermas came to the conclusion that this approach (dealing with questions of epistemology) was not the most expedient, nor was it particularly effective in successfully establishing the singularly “critical” aspect of critical theory: the utopian dimension.58 After 1971, Habermas understands the intuitive ideal of undistorted communication, the utopian moment in his critical theory linking his work to that of the Frankfurt School, in a modified way. What Habermas had formerly identified as a quasi-transcendental interest in emancipation was re-theorized as a structural feature of social interaction, a pragmatic aspect of human communication. According to the pragmatic approach, undistorted communication is anticipated regardless of the contingencies of individuation and socialization.59 The human interest in the various ways of knowing was thus considered less from an anthropological and methodological point of view and more from a pragmatic and linguistic point of view. Habermas is able to address two problems at once: the problem of having to justify the transcendental status of critical reflection and the problem of focusing on questions of epistemology that are seen to be entangled within a philosophy of consciousness. The overall drift of Habermas’s turn inadvertently shifts the tenor of his critical theory without shifting its aim. In terms of the concept of undistorted communication, Habermas ceases to argue that it is an a priori idea and now argues, and continues to argue, that it is a structural feature of our mutually shared form of life, an idealization and projection embedded in the very structure of communication: every act of speaking contains an implicit relation between subjects, one in which mutual autonomy and solidarity are posited for us. Participants in dialogue are not understood to assume this idea for themselves as an anthropological interest; rather, it is now conceptualized as a necessary presupposition of any and all communicative interactions. Habermas argues

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instrumental uses of language, such as orders, some forms of self-expression, or the strategic coordination of action aimed at success are parasitic uses of language, dependent upon its originary use which is communicative, oriented by an attempt to understand.60 The idea of undistorted communication is not a substantial interest of reason but a pragmatic assumption that any speaker must make, consciously or not. Habermas argues that this assumption, which is a formal presupposition of communicative action, can be reconstructed from a theoretical viewpoint. He calls this elaboration a universal or formal pragmatics, the basis for which is a theory of communicative competence. The aim of a formal pragmatic argument is to reconstruct the necessary and unavoidable presuppositions of communication. Whenever we speak, Habermas argues, we pragmatically assume that understanding and agreement are possible. This is not a matter of interest or consciousness, but a performative assumption inherent to the structure of communication and our shared form of life. Habermas’s shift to a formal pragmatic argument also took care of a radical ambiguity within his work regarding the concept of reflection. After Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas makes a distinction between communication and discourse. Communication remains embedded with the context of action whereas discourse transcends the compulsions to action.61 This distinction marks the difference between prescientific or undifferentiated forms of dialogue constituted by the lifeworld and special procedures apropos of argumentation. Discourse, for Habermas, is post-conventional, and it is this specialized form of communication that constitutes intersubjective reflection. Habermas further clarifies this ambiguity in terms of his deployment of psychoanalysis as a model of ideology critique, drawing the distinction between the reflective and the reconstructive. In psychoanalysis, Habermas argues, self-reflection “leads to insight due to the fact that what has previously been unconscious is made conscious in a manner rich in practical consequences.”62 A reconstruction, in contrast, renders explicit and formalizes the intuitive anticipation of undistorted communication, “know how,” in the form of a theory of communicative competence. A successful reconstruction raises an unconsciously functioning rule system to consciousness in the form of “know that.”63 Psychoanalysis, in the therapeutic mode, is not a reconstructive science, even if it still plausibly serves as corrective to distorted communication. In one sense Habermas’s concerns lead him to integrate Freud’s psychoanalysis with Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. In another sense, Habermas’s concerns lead him to make a move away from Freud towards Piaget and Kohlberg in order


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to address what he considers to be the reconstructive side of a critical social psychology.64 In the end, psychoanalysis seems to work better as an analysis of distorted communication than as a theory of communicative competence. When Habermas proposed Freud’s therapeutic psychoanalysis as a model of critical science based upon self-reflection he emphasized the emancipatory self-reflective aspects and de-emphasized the Kantian notion of reconstruction, as coming to grasp the universal and necessary conditions for the possibility of theoretical knowledge, practical reason, and teleological, and aesthetic judgment. In effect, it became evident to Habermas that Freud’s metapsychology was inadequate to achieve the abstraction necessary for formal inquiry, even if therapeutic intervention did adequately convey the significance and power of self-reflection for a theory of distorted communication. As a therapeutic endeavor Habermas acknowledges that psychoanalysis is not a discourse but a self-reflective dialogue.65 Habermas notes that the psychoanalytic dialogue between an analyst and analysand is not a discourse but effects at the same time more and less than a discourse. If effects less because the analysand by no means takes up a symmetrical posture with the analyst, and more, because the dialogical therapeutic encounter is more intense than an ordinary one and yet is not a discourse cut free from action or experience. The aim of analysis, Habermas argues, is to establish an asymmetrical dialogue through which the techniques of analysis bring about the conditions for a symmetrical discourse. Overall, Habermas’s theory of human interests seeks to surmount the entanglements of a subject-centered conception of enlightenment by linking scientific questions with moral and political questions without blurring the distinction. This framework is unified by connections established between technical and practical interests and the interest in critical reflection, understood as emancipatory. Habermas argues this is best addressed through a theory of rationality coupled with a critical theory of ideology, both falling within the realm of a comprehensive social theory. At first Habermas turns toward a radical theory of interests as a means of vindicating the ideals of the Enlightenment (freedom, knowledge, autonomy, and solidarity) by certifying the primacy of moral and social relations over technical or instrumental mastery. Later in his work freedom is grasped as communicative freedom, linking autonomy and solidarity with questions regarding validity in the sciences, legitimacy in morals and politics, and authenticity in subjective experiences. The later developments in Habermas’s thought are modified from its original emphasis on a philosophical anthropology to be more inclusive of a theory of communication.

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THE PROBLEM OF NATURE IN HABERMAS One of the most decisive aspects of Habermas’s project is the way in which he attempts to overcome the weaknesses he sees in the work of the Frankfurt School theorists; specifically, the concern that the foundations of critical theory had never adequately been justified.66 This point is made clear in his sustained critique of Horkheimer and Adorno in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) and his critique of Marcuse, for whom Habermas tends to have the strongest affinity. A notable aspect of the break with his predecessors is the preclusion in communicative theory of any reconciliation with nature, the original utopian ideals of the Frankfurt School (the wholly Other, compassion, autonomous art, Eros, etc.) which indeed becomes meaningless within Habermas’s schema. Habermas begins his critique arguing that Horkheimer and Adorno joined with the nefarious writers of the bourgeoisie, Sade and Nietzsche, to “conceptualize the Enlightenment’s process of self-destruction.”67 His critique can be summarized in three steps: 1) By placing ideology critique itself under suspicion, Horkheimer and Adorno render their critique independent in relation to its own foundations. In doing so they arrive at a totalizing critique, invoking a “reason that is before reason,” which is ultimately self-defeating.68 2) This totalizing critique is a performative contradiction, which is both unappreciative of the rational content of cultural modernity and an aestheticization of criticism itself.69 3) Because the normative content of modernity goes unappreciated, Horkheimer and Adorno fail to provide at least one rational criterion intact for their explanation. The failure to do so leads to nowhere. Habermas notes that at this level of reflection ideology critique slides “off into the groundless” and the distinction between theory and practice is eschewed.70

Habermas’s critique of Marcuse is similar. Unlike Marcuse, Habermas does not hold out for the possibility of a new rationality or new science based on a transformed experience of history and nature, suggesting that any such attempt cannot avoid an entanglement with one form of mysticism or another.71 What concerns him here is that Marcuse seems to be speculating that nature might be addressed not as an object of possible technical control but as a partner in a possible interaction.72 Habermas maintains that this idea “will not stand up to logical scrutiny,” arguing that while we might transform the value of existing governance and the direction and meaning


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of progress, this will not itself alter the standard of rationality that technical sciences affirm.73 Against Marcuse, Habermas differentiates instrumental rationality from communicative rationality, highlighting the difference in the aims and quality of the logic internal to communicative actions in juxtaposition to purposive or instrumental forms of reasoning. Such a separation, it is held, overcomes the more mystical or theological tendency in Marcuse’s thought. This allows Habermas to make a qualitative distinction between a “one-dimensional society” and the moral progress of democratic praxis. One of the substantial differences between Habermas and Marcuse can also be seen in their appropriations of Freud. Habermas argues that Marcuse situates the drives as the prime mover of human history. He writes, The conception of the instincts as the prime mover of history and of civilization as the result of their struggle forgets that we have only derived the concept of impulse privatively from language deformation and behavioral pathology. At the human level we never encounter needs that are not already interpreted linguistically and symbolically affixed to potential actions. The heritage of natural history, consisting of unspecified impulse potentials, determines the initial conditions of the reproduction of the human species. But from the very beginning, the means of this social reproduction gives the preservation of the species the quality of self-preservation.74

Although this would appear to close off sympathetic ties to Marcuse, it is worth noting that Habermas appears to leave open the possibility of further developing the relevance of a “Marcusean” social psychology in relation to the idea of emancipatory reflection. In an address given on 14 March 1980, on the occasion of a “Symposium on the Thought of Herbert Marcuse,” Habermas remarks that the concept of rebellious subjectivity, a natural impulse arising against the triumphs of enslavement, and psychic Thermidor, an internal dynamic that negates possible liberation, has an “almost existentialist dignity.”75 Despite Habermas’s argument that Marcuse’s theory “has the weakness that it cannot consistently account for its own possibility” he concedes that it has the function of preserving a refusal to give in to defeatism.76 Prompted by this evocation, the following examines “the problem of nature” in Habermas’s work. The following makes the case that there are two problems with Habermas’s understanding of nature. First, Habermas violates his own premises regarding the inadmissibility of claims made on behalf of nature when he does in fact make claims about prelinguistic nature, however limited these

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claims are; in particular, his contention that a utopian perspective of reconciliation is ingrained in the biological constitution of the species. Second, Habermas cannot adequately account for the radical break between nature and society that he theorizes without participating in this illicit violation. Joel Whitebook’s influential article, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas” (1979), along with his essays “Reason and Happiness: Some Psychoanalytic Themes in Critical Theory (1985), and “Linguistic Turn or Bilderverbot?: Wish, Image, and Word in Psychoanalytic Theory” (1995) represent sustained attempts to rethink the theorization of internal and external nature in Habermas’s critical theory. While Whitebook readily observes that Habermas’s theory represents an advance in critical theory because it lays claim to a concern with its normative grounding, he argues that Habermas’s concept of internal and external nature not only dramatically alters the spirit of the original project of the Frankfurt School but also becomes embroiled in aporia on its own terms. The theoretical advances of a communicative critical theory come from its quasi-transcendentalist approach, where Habermas is able to make the distinction between two kinds of rationality. Whitebook observes that “Through reflection on the evolution of the species, Habermas claims to have determined categorical frameworks—instrumental and communicative—within which the basic modes of human knowledge and action develop. He then employs those categorical distinctions to elucidate the here-to-fore unclarified foundations and status of critique.”77 While providing the outline of a possible normative grounding for critical theory, Habermas’s categorical distinction leaves nature as nothing more than an object of possible technical control and mastery. What raises us out of nature, according to Habermas, is language: “the only thing whose nature we can know.” This claim remains pivotal for Habermas’s connection between knowledge and human interests as well as his later work. Belying this claim is a three-fold distinction between objective nature, subjective nature, and nature-in-itself.78 For Habermas, nature is the ultimate ground of human existence yet he argues that we have no access to “nature-in-itself ” because an unmediated relation to nature cannot be made thematic within objectivating discourses, not even as the nonidentical (Adorno).79 Summarizing Habermas’s remarks on internal and external nature, Whitebook notes that for Habermas there is an intimate connection between the domination of external and internal nature. The distinction between the two is introduced in order to correct what is perceived to be an unsatisfactory differentiation in Horkheimer and Adorno’s work. Habermas theorizes external and internal nature as the distinction between two possible domains


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of mastery: instrumental rationality, having mastery over external nature, and communicative reason, having mastery over internal nature. Whereas the predominance of the former leads to reification, for the latter reification is a possible but pathological outcome.80 Whitebook explains that the appropriation of internal nature by means of linguistification involves the transformation of instincts through the internalization of intersubjective norms. The proper telos of this process is not reification (systematically distorted communication) but autonomy, individuation, and socialization.81 Habermas is therefore able to envision and differentiate progression and regression on both levels with recourse to a critical social theory, thus overcoming the theoretical deficiencies of the Frankfurt School theorists.82 This achievement is purchased at the price of thoroughgoing disenchantment of nature in the name of the instrumental and communicative mastery of nature. This mastery also signifies transcendence out of the causality of nature into the realm of communicative autonomy. According to Habermas, what raises human beings out of nature is a discursivity that transcends naturalistic limitations through the sole governance of good reasons. This “transcendence within” is disclosed by means of a formal pragmatic investigation. Habermas’s formal pragmatic argument is intended to provide criteria for distortions in communication as well as provide a benchmark for progressive social development. It is argued that the norms inherent to communication are presupposed, and in each utterance tacit reference must be made to them for communication to take place at all. As Whitebook notes, Habermas’s pluralistic and intersubjective understanding of the subject can therefore be understood to be transcendentally unified (through the normative aspects of communication) yet empirically diverse: the genesis of the transcendental subject occurs in the very realm that comprises its object domain wherein which language is the medium that holds the unity of the subject together.83 With regard to the evolution and transcendence of the subject out of nature, Habermas accepts a degree of “unavoidable circularity” which must ultimately refer to the material groundedness of subjectivity and the “fact of reason.”84 Whitebook adds, however, “Despite the impossibility of ultimate foundations, Habermas is nevertheless satisfied that, in the course of evolution, mental structures developed which owing to their having emerged through a process of natural selection somehow fit the world. The task of theory is not to deduce the validity of those structures in a way that would require an ultimate standpoint, but to explicate that ‘fit.’”85 Even without an ultimate grounding of subjectivity, Habermas maintains that the normative grounding for his social theory can be situated in the

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natural history of the species and the evolutionary processes of socio-cultural development.86 This relies on a weak naturalist argument which Habermas has explicated only in a tertiary way.87 Nevertheless, these processes of evolution can be reconstructed scientifically through an objectivating attitude in a way that does not find its limits as an empirical theory.88 Whitebook argues that Habermas’s reconstructive theory, which retains transcendental elements despite Habermas’s avowal otherwise, wants the advantages of transcendental philosophy without confronting its dilemmas.89 Whitebook argues that Habermas’s pragmatic turn does not appear to solve the problem of transcendental reflection. Despite the claim that we can say nothing about nature outside of the nature of language, Whitebook notes that Habermas does make several claims about prelinguistic nature as having an inherent capacity for language-use. Although Habermas limits his discussion about nature to postulation of its anthropological and cognitive potential, Whitebook observes that this horizon does not constitute a selfevident point of termination, suggesting that Habermas is guilty of a false objectivism, of “arbitrarily arresting reflection.”90 By limiting reflection to the narrow findings of formal pragmatics, which uncovers the presuppositions of participants in dialogue within an evolutionary theory, Whitebook draws attention to a certain irony wherein Habermas’s transcendentalism is halted by what appears to be a matter of aesthetic taste or Aristotelian phronesis.91 Why stop at the claim that human nature is proto-linguistic? What other claims could be viably made about human nature? Whitebook further notes that this claim in itself is already illicit on Habermas’s own terms. Indicating human beings are by nature proto-linguistic is (at least) a weak claim about human nature. This claim might seem anachronistic if Habermas had not also commented on the “private rationality” of the animal world. Habermas writes, for instance, “On the level of animal behavior . . . the moment of intentionality has not yet become detached from the modes of behavior and incorporated into symbolic contexts.”92 The attribution of non-symbolically mediated intentionality is an exacting comment about the natural world. Whitebook goes on to argue that the biological sciences might further provide insight into nature in a way that is relevant to meaningful communicative relations without the kind of prohibition that Habermas sets out. How this might play into Habermas’s social theory remains to be developed in detail, however the conclusions of his analysis are shy on this possibility. In light of this, through the work of the reconstructive sciences, Whitebook points out that Habermas claims to have located a sui generis phenomenon: a communicative ethics promises to eliminate the impasse of the “is” and the


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“ought” by removing the scientistic obstruction to normative theory by locating language as the field where the fact-value problem can be resolved.93 As a rejoinder, Whitebook tentatively raises a series of concerns with Habermas’s project, not the least of which is its thorough anthropocentricism. As opposed to other forms of naturalistic ethics, Habermas’s communicative ethics holds that human beings are the sole locus of value and the only beings that command respect, ruling out any ethical conception of nature as an “end in itself.” Self-consciousness is therefore considered to be qualitatively different from the rest of natural existence. The problem here, as Whitebook sees it, is that Habermas’s distinction between nature and subjectivity is achieved at the price of denying all worth to nature: what is “good for nature” must somehow be derived from what is “good for us.” Pressing the point, Whitebook asks “Can we continue to deny all worth to nature and treat it as a mere means without destroying the natural preconditions for the existence of subjects?”94 The issue is not so much that communicative relations with our ecological environment are not possible, but that we ourselves are natural beings that are already in a dialectical relation with our non-communicative bodies. The subject-object paradigm is appropriate for apprehending this, keeping in mind that the object here is simultaneously the subject. Failure to account for this relation cannot be understood as anything but a form of idealism or eco-amnesia. It should be noted that Habermas does not at all shy away from the consequences of his position. He argues, “The resurrection of nature cannot be logically conceived within materialism, no matter how much the early Marx and the speculative minds in the Marxist tradition (Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno) find themselves attracted by this heritage of mysticism.”95 Here, as Whitebook detects, the “resurrection of nature” refers to the transformation of our relation to and knowledge of nature such that nature would once again be taken as purposeful, meaningful, or understood as possessing moral value. Nature, insofar as it is taken as an object of cognition, can only be an object of instrumental control. This is not a contingent fact but instead is seen by Habermas to be derived from the invariant features of our anthropological capacities which constitute nature as an object of possible experience.96 The critical point that Whitebook develops with regard to Habermas’s position is that the radical hiatus between prehuman and human nature requires at least a weak naturalist argument to support any claims about prehuman nature. Such claims violate Habermas’s position that we can say nothing about nature-in-itself. Claims about prelinguistic reality are parallel to claims regarding the potentials of nature-in-itself. For Habermas, human

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beings have an evolutionary disposition toward language-use. This disposition toward socialization and individuation through language, Habermas argues, is hard-wired into the makeup of human beings. For instance, Habermas approvingly discusses the gains of Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory; based on his analysis, Chomsky posits that we are organically equipped with a system of language as such, a generative grammar.97 Habermas’s communicative theory attempts to avoid this hiatus through a critique of scientism and its reinstatement of the legitimacy of practical reason, defending the possibility of a rational discussion of the goals of social development resting on consensus. The price of this purchase is the program of emancipation conceived of as the complete disembodying of humanity from nature.98 This move is analogous to a conceptual deficient in Habermas’s later work, carefully articulated by Seyla Benhabib, pertaining epistemic incompleteness.99 Whitebook observes that this appears more to represent the pinnacle of the domination of nature rather than its opposite: “Habermas . . . asserts the enlightenment heritage of practical reason against its legacy of technical reason in order to achieve the fulfillment of the former.”100 “An emancipated society for Habermas consists in the completion, and not the transfiguration, of the modern project.”101 Whitebook maintains that we are confronted with what appears to be a serious problem: Is there any way to distinguish between the appearance of communicative action, discourse free from domination, without a circular appeal? We should consider that the communicative mastery of nature might itself constitute a paradoxical mastery of the self and it is this possibility that may lead to a reconsideration of the theses of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. THE PROBLEM OF INTERNAL NATURE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS Picking up where his earlier essay left off, Whitebook discusses the earlier Frankfurt School idea of reconciliation with external nature, an idea for which Habermas is able to conceive a solution that does not require such a reconciliation. Although Whitebook observes that within Habermas’s framework the idea of reconciliation with external nature is meaningless, this question might be addressed within the Habermasian field with regard to inner nature, as a question of happiness. 102 Whitebook remarks that despite the normative foundation that Habermas articulates, he is only able to draw utopian energies from the “iron cage” of a radically disenchanted modernity. Taking this position, it becomes


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incumbent upon Habermas that he must highlight one area where actual progress has occurred, as he does: moral development.103 Moral progress has occurred, according to Habermas, through the evolutionary learning processes of the species: socialization and individuation. In the process of modern rationalization the mythical, religious, and ontological justification of norms is no longer acceptable. Given the fact of value pluralism, modern society requires, as part of its internal constitution, a shift to a post-conventional morality.104 Drawing on the insights of a formal pragmatic argument we have discovered, Habermas argues, the formal principles for discursive justification that provide the procedural standards for the legitimation of basic norms: post-conventional morality. These norms, after being purged of all elements of tradition, charisma, and paternalism, rest on nothing but the intersubjectively conceived principles of pure practical reason.105 By means of a critical consideration of Habermas’s claims, Whitebook approaches the theorization of post-conventional socialization and morality from the perspective of happiness. He notes that the fundamental insight that takes Habermas beyond early critical theory is the idea that the domination of outer nature and the domination of inner nature follow different logics: “Whereas the domination of outer nature proceeds through the application of nomological laws to an heterogeneous object, the mastery of inner nature takes place through the internalization of intersubjective norms.”106 Habermas’s adherence to the primacy of linguisticality in the socialization process is represented most saliently in his communicative reading of Freud. However, Whitebook argues, the idealizing tendency of language in Habermas’s reading “has the effect of . . . destroying certain of Freud’s central intentions in order to save them.”107 The cardinal tenet that Habermas violates here is the reality and independence of the body as formulated in the theory of the drives. Whitebook remarks, Habermas has difficulty contacting extralinguistic reality from within the equally closed circle of intersubjectivity. The linguistic transcendental turn does not allow him to grant the fully independent status to the extralinguistic existence that his materialism requires. Thus with respect to external nature, the simple, uncontroversial fact that external, prehuman nature produces speaking, human nature . . . must necessarily remain an inexplicable mystery to the transcendental philosopher. Habermas is forced to introduce the notion of privative reasoning as a theoretical expedient to account for the precursors of human subjectivity that exist among the higher species of animals. And with respect to inner nature, Habermas must likewise privately derive the drives from

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Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory the distortions of communication in the analytic setting rather than grant them an independent status in their own right.108

Because Habermas wants to argue that inner nature is susceptible of socialization (linguistification), wherein language functions as a kind of transformer, it must in some sense already be protolinguistic and he must therefore deny the existence of the unconscious as a “nonlinguistic substratum.”109 In this shift, from the independence of the body to the gradual linguistification of reality, the question of reconciliation with internal nature disappears. This also establishes a shift away from the utopian impulse of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse to problems exclusive to the dynamics of justice, leaving the more troublesome dynamics of the unconscious behind. The danger here, as Whitebook suggests, is that the project of modernity sacrifices too much if the naturalistic or sensuous and Romantic tradition that runs from Feuerbach through the young Marx to Freud as well as the early Frankfurt School is abandoned.110 In other words, questions concerning reconciliation with external nature might be comprehended as questions concerning inner nature. Furthermore, Habermas also runs the risk of rendering the project of modernity indefensible when it severs or becomes disembedded from its connections to questions of cognition which could, however provisionally, be linked to the natural substratum of human existence of which the unconscious and phantasy are a part.111 Whitebook’s overall approach is guided by a fundamental intuition that language remains ensnared by a paradoxical dependence on natural phenomena. His approach does not so much wish to revive a naturalistic theory as it does attempt to account for this dependence theoretically. Against Habermas’s apprehension of the unconscious as a pictorial derivative of language, a position that is a prohibition on images, Whitebook argues that this viewpoint has the unfortunate consequence of liquidating the most subversive discovery of Freud: the unconscious. Drawing on Freudian analysis Whitebook attempts to reclaim the importance of the nonlinguistic substratum of consciousness by developing a theory of sublimation.112 As already indicated, Whitebook notes that Habermas adds a second dimension to the analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, an intersubjective dimension. In doing so Habermas does not have to embark on a search for the “good Other” of instrumental reason and the autocratic subject.113 In contrast, Habermas points to the real progress of modernism in the form of moral development. Whitebook’s analysis, situated in relation to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and to a lesser extend Paul Ricoeur, argues that the Habermas’s linguistic turn illegitimately limits the


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possibilities of critical theory. These limitations can be detected in Habermas’s evisceration of the unconscious. Whitebook argues that a reexamination of Freud’s mode of defending the project of modernity can provide an instructive counterbalance to the excessive formalism and rationalism of the Habermasian approach. Whitebook reads Freud to offer a deep and sustained encounter with the “Other of reason,” the unconscious and the phenomena of dreams, taboos, perversions, symptoms, narcissism, psychoses, and so on. Freud’s program explores the “irrational” through its integration into an expanded sense of reason, although not in a communicative sense. Whitebook maintains that Habermas proffers only a limited conception of communication which loses the element of tension between Romanticism and Enlightenment, and the possible entwinement of regressive and progressive tendencies that energized Freud’s program and thereby breaks with the more critical and instructive elements of the Counter-enlightenment.114 The corrective concept Whitebook introduces is the Freudian idea of Enstellung which emphasizes that some degree of distortion and contamination is uneliminable from rationality. To this end, Whitebook argues that a theory of sublimation can provide an account of the relation between genesis and validity that avoids the traps of an unattainable idealistic purism and a self-destructing genealogical reductionism.115 As argued, Habermas’s self-admitted linguistic transcendentalism prevents him from adequately reaching or theorizing the extralinguistic reality of external nature. Considered from the other direction, from the inside, Whitebook argues that this also prevents Habermas from adequately reaching and accounting for the prelinguistic reality of inner nature: the unconscious.116 This problem, as Whitebook notes, is analogous to the Kantian problem of the Ding-an-sich. Habermas, who abstains from speaking about “the object” for fear of regression into pre-critical metaphysics, upholds what Whitebook takes to be a Bilderverbot, a prohibition of images. The problem is that Habermas cannot explain the intuitive mediation between nature-in-itself, the nonlinguistic substratum of the subject, and self-reflection. Accounting for this mediation is vital in order to sustain Habermas’s claim that critical theory must be about to account for the validity of its own insights. Whitebook notes that Habermas’s starting point is the “fact of communication” and thus inquires into how communicative relations can become deformed into the privatized unconscious.117 In Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas proclaimed the unconscious to be a derivative phenomenon. In Habermas’s refashioning of Freud, the primary processes and the unconscious, insofar as they are meaningful, are strictly parasitic, created by and as a result from the deformation of secondary processes. Habermas thus

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“emphatically rejects the canonical distinction between word-representations and thing-representations and ipso facto the existence of a nonlinguistic unconscious consisting in a stream of pictorial representations.”118 As Whitebook comments, “by denying the distinction between word-representations and thing-representations, Habermas obeys a prohibition on images” which not only denies a potential source of the political imaginary119 but also rejects one of the fundamental tenets of Freud’s metapsychology: The system Ucs. contains the thing-cathexes of the objects, the first and true object-cathexes; the system Pcs. comes about by this thing-representation being hypercathected through being linked with the wordpresentations corresponding to it. It is these hypercathexes, we may suppose, that bring about a higher psychical organization and make it possible for the primary processes to be succeeded by the secondary process which is dominant in the Pcs.120

Whitebook further argues that In Freud the point is thoroughly unambiguous: the unconscious is characterized by the primary process and thing-representations; the preconscious and consciousness, by the secondary process and wordrepresentations. Indeed, the border between the unconscious and the preconscious is traversed by the addition of word-cathexes to thingcathexes and is, therefore, at the same time, the border between the prelinguistic and the linguistic.121

Following Freud, Whitebook also notes that imagistic mentation, because of its plasticity and fluidity, is richer in association than conceptual representations since they “present wishes and desires scenically as fulfilled” and is therefore “much better suited for the anarchic purposes of the primary process and the pleasure principle than are the syntactically and energically bound secondary processes of linguistically mediated thought.”122 Rainer Nägele has offered a similar insight. Examining Habermas’s understanding of dreams, he notes that for Habermas dream language has no grammar of its own. Habermas writes: “The sequence of a visual scene is no longer ordered according to syntactical rules because the differentiation of linguistic means for logical relations are lacking; even elementary basic rules of logic are canceled. In the degrammaticized language of the dream, relations are constituted by fading over and by condensation of the material.”123 Nägele maintains, as Whitebook also notes, that Habermas’s account is significantly


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different from Freud’s, although on the surface recognizable. For Freud, the description of the possibilities of dream language point in another direction. Freud was not so much concerned with the lack of logical signs, what Habermas considers to be the degrammaticization of language, as much as he emphasized that dreams present a problem of a different media of representation. Freud therefore uses the relationship between literature and a painting as a paradigm. Freud writes, The plastic arts of painting and sculpture labor . . . under a similar limitation as compared with poetry, which can make use of speech; and here once again the reason for their incapacity lies in the nature of the material which these two forms of art manipulate in their effort to express something. Before painting became acquainted with the laws of expression by which it is governed, it made attempts to get over this handicap. In ancient paintings small labels were hung from the mouths of the person represented, containing in written characters the speeches which the artist despaired of representing pictorially.124

Painting, in other words, has its own order of representation, its own syntax or grammar. This syntax, as Freud discovers in the dream, is closer to the tropes and figures of rhetoric than to the syllogistic figures of logic. As such, the dream represents a kind of language; the dream speaks its own language, but it is a language of images, irreducible to privatizations. Whitebook further observes that Habermas’s commitment to the linguistic position is such that he is compelled to systematically eliminate the relevance of extralinguistic phenomena by assimilating their apparent pre- or non-linguisticality to the linguistic. Quoting Habermas, Only in the medium of language is the heritage of man’s natural history articulated in the form of interpreted needs: the heritage of a plastic impulse potential, which, while preoriented in libidinal and aggressive directions, is otherwise undefined, owing to its uncoupling from inherited motor activity. On the human level, instinctual demands are represented by interpretations, that is, by hallucinatory wish-fulfillments.125

This “almost bizarre” approach is problematic, according to Whitebook, because it supports “the strange equation of hallucinatory wish fulfillments with interpretations.”126 If such an equation correct, “a central distinction of Freud’s entire theoretical construction, namely, between the progressive and regressive functioning of the psyche, would be lost.”127 Hallucinatory

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wish fulfillment, as Whitebook notes, is the result of the psyche’s tendency to work in “a backward direction.”128 Habermas thus ignores the most general and striking psychological characteristic of a dream, that a thought of something that is desired is represented not as a statement but pictorially, as a scene. Habermas’s failure to appreciate the psyche’s inherent tendency to work in a backward direction is only one aspect of his larger difficulty in dealing with regressive phenomena and the prelinguistic basis of subjectivity. It also signals a failure to distinguish or develop a possible distinction between domination and psychical regression. In this respect, Habermas’s emphasis on the dream as a text, as opposed to the grammar of a painting for instance, is misleading since the text is not itself achieved by language but by an extralinguistic force working on language.129 Whitebook detects that Habermas’s error of equating hallucinations and interpretations results from the overextension of the translatability thesis, the idea that the unconscious can be made conscious via speech entailing that the unconscious must already be linguistic. With Ricoeur, Whitebook notes, just because the unconscious is amenable to translation into words does not mean that it is wholly linguistic at the start; simply because French is translatable into English does not establish that French is already English.130 HABERMAS’ REJOINDER Habermas’s response to Whitebook emphasizes that his philosophical approach correlates with an implicitly formulated “self-understanding of modernity” which seeks to explain rationalism’s decentered understanding of the world developed through the differentiation of the value spheres of science, morality, and art and the ideals of bourgeois society and of the democratic constitutional state.131 Habermas argues the idea of modernity as an incomplete project, “diverted from its goal, garbled in its intentions, often unrecognizable, a project of modernity at variance with itself, which has even been transformed into its opposite” yet, nevertheless, instantiated within existing institutions and forms of life.132 Habermas responds to Whitebook’s reservations by focusing on the normative basis of a procedural conception of reason. Only on the level of argumentation, Habermas argues, can relations to nature be justified and reconciled. This precludes the possibility of nature as a partner in dialogue: nature does not have a voice and normative relations are only conceivable against the background of communicative action. Habermas additionally remarks that there are two misgivings to which this formalistic construction gives rise: this position seems to preclude as irrational a non-objectivistic relation to nature and this eclipse seems to allow


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for no mediation between the universal structures of knowing, speaking, and acting and historically developed traditions on the other.133 Responding to these concerns, Habermas argues that the concept of nature-in-itself serves as a postulate motivated by epistemological reflections but cannot be linked to the results of research in an unmediated way. However, the postulate establishes a perspective from which a reconstruction of natural history can be undertaken as a prehistory of the socio-cultural form of life, serving as a limit concept, by way of total epistemic inaccessibility, for a formal pragmatic theory of knowledge.134 Habermas outlines nine basic orientations that can be taken up: 1) objectivity: cognitive-instrumental (external nature); cognitive-strategic (society); objectivistic relation to self (internal nature). 2) norm-conformative: moral relation to non-objectivated environment (external nature); obligatory relations (society); censorious relation to self (internal nature). 3) expressive: aesthetic relation to non-objectivated environment (external nature); self-presentation (society); sensuous-spontaneous relation to self (internal nature).135

Habermas claims that only a few of these formal-pragmatic relations are suitable for the accumulation of knowledge. To argue for reconciliation with external nature at the level of the scientific system does not make sense.136 Furthermore, in these orientations a relation to nature from an ethical standpoint cannot become thematic. When such questions do arise, as stylized questions of the good life, they must meet with the approval of those involved under the conditions of will-formation as questions of justice, rendering practical questions accessible to cognitive processing by way of abstraction.137 Drawing on a remark made by Horkheimer to Walter Benjamin, Habermas notes that posthumous approval remains abstract because it lacks the force of reconciliation: justice remains stained with the idea that injustice is irrevocable. This, for Habermas, also applies to arguments about nature, which would rely on an “ethic of sympathy” exceeding moral-practical insights.138 Habermas links this idea with the notion of “anamnetic solidarity” and remembering. Like an ethic of sympathy, “anamnetic solidarity follows as a postulate from the universalistic approach of the discourse ethic; but the relation established through compassion itself lies beyond moral-practical insights.”139 A moral attitude toward nature, and perhaps even moral experiences arising from relations to nature, is possible, but only redeemable within a discursive context.

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Habermas further notes three problems that must be overcome when attempting to gain theoretical access to nature: the “yawning gap” in the principle egalitarian relation of reciprocity built into communicative action, the limits of empathy into alien life, and the grounding of a naturalistic ethic without recourse to the substantial reason of religious or metaphysical worldviews.140 In short, the unity of reason is not to be had at the level of the cultural spheres of value (empathy, religion, and so on) but in the communicative practice of everyday life. In this everyday practice, cognitive explanations, moral expectations, expressions, and evaluations interpenetrate and are understood to be immanent to common judgments, expectations, and understanding of the world around us.141 Despite his thoroughgoing anthropocentrism, Habermas will remark much later when asked about the relation of communicative reason to the environment, It’s true that the time bombs of a recklessly exploited natural world are ticking faintly and persistently. But it’s also true that while nature, in its own way, plots its revenge for the mutilations we have inflicted on it, nature also lifts its voice in us. Adorno spoke evocatively of the “mindfulness of nature in us.” The paralyzing sadness that overcomes us when confronted with a landscape destroyed, poisoned, literally asphyxiated by human hands and by the trash of civilization, is unmistakable. But on the other hand, the voice of our feelings would lose its own warning force if we melancholically give ourselves over to this sadness, or if the warning is suppressed by the urgency of our most immediate needs. We won’t escape from the double bind of ecology and the market economy by getting sucked into the pull of these intuitive end-of-the-world moods. Instead we have to let ourselves learn from our own feelings. Only further enlightenment—docta spes—has grown from the devastation of enlightenment. Totalizing critiques of reason—which reason itself brings to confusion—are worthless. Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse—which is not to appeal to some sort of deified reason, but on the contrary to say that it is only through reason that we can determine the limits of our rationality . . . modernity can’t just be peeled off like a dirty shirt. It’s in our skin. We find ourselves in the condition of modern life: we didn’t freely choose it; it is existentially unavoidable. But for the opened eyes of modernity, this condition also implies a challenge, and not just disaster.142

It would appear Habermas takes the position that human beings have at least some degree of intuitive access to nature-in-itself so that we can learn


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from our feelings, and that this is, in part, the basis of human feeling and sentiment. A similar statement can be found in Habermas’s essay “Remarks on Discourse Ethics” (1991) where he expresses the view that human beings may have duties toward animals and the natural world to the extent that we stand in quasi-communication relations with natural phenomena. Habermas writes: “Like moral obligations generally, our quasi-moral responsibility toward animals is related to and grounded in the potential for harm inherent in all social interaction. To the extend that creatures participate in our social interactions, we encounter them in the role of an alter ego, as an other in need of protection; this grounds the expectation that we will assume a fiduciary responsibility for their claims.”143 Habermas’s references to an ethic of sympathy, his curious use of the phrase “quasi-moral,” and his comment regarding a quasi-communicative relation with nature as a protective institution that compensates for a constitutional precariousness implicit in the socio-cultural form of life itself, are certainly suggestive yet the are without a doubt obscure within the larger context of his work. Habermas’s second rejoinder to Whitebook re-emphasizes the importance of replacing “drive energies” with “interpreted needs” and describing “instinctual vicissitudes” from the perspective of identity formation and processes of interaction. Habermas points out that in this communicativetheoretical reading, “inner nature is in no way vaporized into culturalistic haze.”144 Habermas argues that this shift does not eliminate inner nature as an extralinguistic referent; but rather, decides in favor of the perspective of a life-world intersubjectively shared by participants. Habermas adds that happiness, unlike justice or knowledge, is not a concept that relates to questions of universal significance like propositional truth or normative rightness since it is related to particular constellations of lived practice, value orientations, traditions and competences as a whole. Habermas then reasserts that a “passion for justice” underlies the possibility of any possible “good life” and this is what has been, historically, carelessly and arbitrarily violated.145 CONCLUSION It becomes apparent through Whitebook’s critical consideration of Habermas’s work that there are a series of misgivings which arise. Crucial here is whether Habermas’s approach does justice to the formative processes that constitute subjectivity, from the natural substratum of subjectivity to the entwinement of language and phantasy. Despite the concerns that have been raised by Whitebook, Habermas’s position retains a fairly stable trajectory. In one of Habermas’s most recent publications, for instance, he writes: “the

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organic equipment and cultural way of life of homo sapiens have a ‘natural’ origin and are accessible in principle to explanation by evolutionary theory” and “‘our’ learning processes—those possible within the framework of socio-cultural forms of life—in a certain way merely continue antecedent ‘evolutionary learning processes’ that have in turn given rise to the structures of our forms of life.”146 Habermas’s position remains one in which human beings have naturally evolved into creatures with the capacity to speak, and that in speaking language transforms their relationships from relations based on instinctual self-preservation to relations based upon moral respect and mutual reciprocity. Thus, Habermas argues that there is an uncontroversial natural basis for subjectivity and insists that this basis is insolubly social. I do not disagree, but it may be better to conceive “social” as something more than shared linguistic expressions. Human beings, as natural beings, apprehend their own nature through culture and, in terms of moral theory, are responsible for that nature insofar as it can be understood as mediated by social relations. This nature is not exhausted within language, and it seems to me that it is an arbitrary arrest of self-reflection to end reflection at this point. The two substantial concessions that Habermas grants Whitebook’s critique have to do with the possibility of an ethics of sympathy and anamnetic solidarity. However, with regard to anamnetic solidarity, Peter Dews argues that it is a moral supplement which discourse ethics requires for internal reasons but cannot be provided from within the theoretical framework of a moral theory of discourse. Dews remarks that using the analogy that Habermas draws between anamnetic solidarity and an ethic of sympathy, “Simply to suggest the extension of anamnetic solidarity—by analogy—to non-human nature is to beg the question of what would constitute injustice in this domain.”147 Seeking solidarity with those who have suffered past injustices is not analogous to environment destruction. Likewise, Dews is also critical of Habermas’s notion of quasi-communicative relations with nature or the animal world: “The mere fact of standing in a communicative relation of some kind to another being is not sufficient to generate a normative limit on purely self-interested behaviour towards that being.” Nevertheless, Dews notes, there is a strong sense “that it is morally wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering on non-human creatures . . . and Habermas needs to be able to account for this.”148 These comments by Dews bring us full circle back to Habermas’s critical consideration of Marcuse’s work. When Habermas remarked that Marcuse’s thought has an almost “existential dignity” he is drawing attention to the persistence of a cognitive and moral problem that has not yet been accounted for adequately in theory; that of an instinctual substratum


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of human consciousness, the problem of internal nature. There is little doubt that language operates as a transformer of the psyche, but Habermas’s point becomes questionable when he claims that this is a radical break with nature. As is evident, this point cannot be accepted when, at the same time, it relies upon at least some claims about life prior to this break. Habermas’s comments about the “private reasoning” of animals, the protolinguistic dynamics of human nature, and the quasi-communicative relation assumed by humans with regard to the environment, all indicate that the frontier between nature and the social is not as clear cut as he otherwise theorizes it to be. The fact that his argument, especially his formal pragmatics, relies on a weak naturalism really must be explained with greater theoretical clarity. Although Habermas’s formal pragmatics is based on the performative use of language, the legitimacy of this argument rests not only on the performative aspect (which could simply be a transcendental illusion) but also on a naturalist position: that language qua morality is a defense mechanism against the hostilities of external nature.149 Without this ingrained link between morality and selfpreservation then the entire process of reason giving and taking would lose its normative basis and its relation to human interests. There are two other issues that are pressing. The first pertains to the possibility of developing an explanation that either accounts for the aporia in Habermas’s work. The second pertains to the Habermas’s position in relation to the legacy of the Frankfurt School. With regard to the “existential dignity” of the human relation with nature and the possibility of developing a theory of instinctual development, it becomes evident that a theory of intuition is also necessary. As has already been indicated, it appears as though Habermas accepts that human beings have access to nature in an intuitive sense. Although he argues that we can know nothing about nature in itself, even the supplemental comments are put aside, there remains the problem of the exact relation of the intuitive access to nature. If language is conceived as a transcendental medium, then it would appear that the relation between the natural world and the human world is transcendentally severed. This would bring about the startling possibility that objectivating attitudes in relation to the nature world would be determined not by the object in question, but in relation to the cultural-linguistic tradition of the observer. Without the postulate of nature-in-itself as a constant for all human beings, it becomes evident that linguistic theory risks losing its grasp of anything other than an interpretive conception of objectivity altogether. Habermas is clearly against this possibility, yet his work does not address the status of our intuitive access to nature-in-itself in adequate detail. In the process of intuition, what exactly has been or can be grasped?

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How has this grasping been made possible? These questions would appear to elude the perspective of the transcendental communications theorist.150 If, however, we view processes of development as both transformative and simultaneously contiguous with nature there may be room for accounting for both the linguistic and imagistic constitution of the subject. Finally, there remains a concern about the relation between Habermas’s work and the Frankfurt School. If the notion of reconciliation with external nature after the linguistic turn can no longer be comprehended in the same way, the relation between modernity and happiness may not necessary evaporate as well. Whitebook suggests that this might be addressed as a question about internal nature, and this may well prove to be the most promising path for a critical social theory. Indeed, the sobering “joyless reformism” that Habermas seems to find himself defending is certainly a bitter pill for theorists sympathetic to the interests and aims of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse.151 Even if the question of the legacy of the Frankfurt School is largely heuristic, it would seem highly problematic for a contemporary social theory to abide by the liberal split between public and private forms of reasoning so as to give priority to justice over happiness. Indeed, it is not difficult to conceive that a just society in accord with Habermas’s theoretical architecture could exist in such a way that the citizens of such a society as a whole may be thoroughly miserable. Naturally, simply pointing this out by no means solves the problem. Nevertheless, it becomes relevant to investigate the possibility of striving towards a just society in such a way that the “passion for justice” becomes progressively undercut. The paradox of establishing justice based on a hollowed out lifeworld, detached from concepts of the good life, may need to be addressed in terms other than those Habermas sets down. I argue that this can be done without regressive consequences by inquiring into the nature of identity formation and narrative self-understanding. The next chapter examines Habermas’s debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer. Given the problems accrued by Habermas’s attempt to develop a theory of language with the advantages of a transcendental philosophy without weaknesses, I evaluate the status of his critical theory in relation to hermeneutics.

Chapter Three

Critical Theory and Hermeneutics

The Gadamer-Habermas debate is constituted by a series of exchanges selectively brought together in the anthology Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (1971). The exchange begins in 1965, with the publication of the second edition of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. This edition contained a preface wherein Gadamer replies to criticism and a variety of misunderstandings about his work. Habermas’s first response to Gadamer, “A Review of Truth and Method,” was published in 1967 in a special volume of the journal Philosophische Rundschau (also included as part of On the Logic of the Social Sciences, 1970). In the same year, 1967, Gadamer published “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem” and “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology Critique” in his Kleine Schriften. In 1970, Habermas’s “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality” appeared in the Festschrift in honor of Gadamer entitled Hermeneutik und Dialektik as well as “Summation and Response” in Continuum. The principal work serving as Habermas’s substantial contribution is articulated in Knowledge and Human Interests published in 1968 with an appendix outlining his overall project as announced in 1965. Also of relevance are Habermas’s essays “On Systematically Distorted Communication” and “A Theory of Communicative Competence” both published in 1970 in the journal Inquiry and in Recent Sociology No. 2 edited by Hans Peter Dreitzel. Gadamer’s closing response, “Reply to my Critics,” was published in Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik. Although both theorists continued to discuss one another’s works over the years, the aforementioned contributions are widely recognized as encapsulating the debate between critical theory and hermeneutics. Despite the disagreements between Gadamer and Habermas, hermeneutics and critical theory come forward in this encounter as theoretical trajectories committed to political and philosophical modernism: both theoretical orientations are steadfast in retaining the ideals of the Enlightenment in a systematic fashion 77

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almost unparalleled in contrast to other rivaling theoretical orientations in the humanities and social sciences. Habermas’s aim in setting hermeneutics apart from other forms of theoretical inquiry is to illustrate that hermeneutics, as representative of one of the most developed paradigms of linguistic analysis to date, harbors a series of blind spots rendering it incapable of emerging as a truly critical voice. In particular, he is concerned that Gadamer’s explicit defense of tradition and vindication of prejudice might unwittingly interlock hermeneutics with historical continuities that he understands to have been shattered after Auschwitz. Gadamer’s response to Habermas is that his conception of critical rationality fantastically overestimates the capabilities of practical reason in an abstract and utopian manner, thus making Habermas guilty of an ahistoric critique and an analysis governed by an inappropriate expectation, an illusion. Habermas’s debate with Gadamer takes place in the twilight of the transition from a more anthropological understanding of knowledge-constitutive interests to formal pragmatics, and from a critical-reconstructive reading of psychoanalysis to a theory of cognitive development. The debate is, in my opinion, one of the most vivid and controversial moments within Habermas’s philosophical writings. Remarkably, in what might simply be a philosophical-historical oddity, it is extraordinary that virtually none of the North American secondary literature on the debate, or even in the secondary literature investigating the tension between critical social theory and hermeneutics in general, examines Habermas’s claims regarding psychoanalysis and social theory in significant detail. It is almost as if his subtle agreement with Gadamer’s critique, where Habermas notes that Gadamer and Giegel “quite rightly criticize undifferentiated attempts to transfer a model borrowed from psychoanalysis to large groups” was enough to silence and stifle any further inquiry into the matter.1 Still, it seems strange that Habermas’s unequivocal claim that psychoanalysis is “the only tangible example of a science incorporating methodical self-reflection” has been so substantially ignored.2 What is striking about this neglect is the fact that in Habermas’s work psychoanalysis remains a paradigmatic model expressing the unity of reconstructive and self-reflective inquiry. Not only is it a paradigmatic model, but clinical psychoanalysis is a necessary therapeutic and diagnostic form of intersubjective reflection that is required as a means of correcting or alleviating distorted forms of communication arising in dialogue. For instance, in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) Habermas consciously references his earlier work in support of his therapeutic-critical reading and highlights its ongoing significance.3 This is not surprising. Without the plausibility of his interpretation of psychoanalysis one of the key pillars upholding the distinction


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between critical theory and hermeneutics crumbles. However, Habermas’s virtually seamless transition to a more hierarchical and stage theory of cognitive development has eclipsed both his interest in the matter and, unfortunately, the interest of most commentators. What is puzzling is the way in which the very discourse that at one time proved decisive in bringing the conflict between critical theory and hermeneutics to such a highly developed encounter disappears from view. PSYCHOANALYSIS AT THE MOMENT OF ITS ECLIPSE In the essay “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality” Habermas affirmatively considers the question of whether critical sciences such as psychoanalysis can by-pass the way in which artful interpretation is tied to everyday pre-critical communication. With the help of a theoretically guided semantic analysis he argues that critical theory can “refute the hermeneutic claim to universality.”4 In order to refute hermeneutics’ claim to universality Habermas must demonstrate that the critical sciences simultaneously embody two kinds of understanding: explanatory-diagnostic (descriptive) and historicalhermeneutic (normative). He argues that psychoanalysis, as an example of a critical science, successfully accomplishes this task. In drawing upon psychoanalysis as a means of overcoming the limitations of hermeneutics, Habermas found it necessary to reinterpret several of Freud’s key concepts, the drive dynamics of the unconscious in particular. Read through a communicative lens, the unconscious appears as a derivative of language, returning only as a quasi-natural force acting “as if ” through causal mechanisms to distort the identity and self-understanding of an actor. Such quasi-causal mechanisms render aspects of the self alien and incomprehensible. The aim of dialogical critical reflection, then, is to therapeutically restore excommunicated or privatized linguistic fragments to their proper place within public communicability. With this in mind, Habermas argues that linguistic utterances and corresponding physical compulsions become meaningless when detached from the fluidity of public communication and conscious awareness. Public communication is typified by the capacity of one speaker to reciprocally adopt the perspective of another speaker in dialogue as well as align speaking and acting in a congruent way. “Distorted speech” is a phenomenon that occurs when ordinary language begins to contain apparently meaningless dimensions. Habermas views the meaningless components of language as signifying a broken script, a disturbance in conscious awareness. Language becomes meaningless, he argues, through two mechanisms: internal distortion (repression)

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and power (external factors leading to systematic distortions in communication). The meaningless symbols can be equated with symptoms, indicators of repression that bar the subject from self-comprehension. Repressed symbols are no longer readily accessible to comprehension in an ordinary sense, they are excommunicated bits and pieces of language. Understanding excommunicated symbols, Habermas maintains, is beyond the capacity and scope of hermeneutic reasoning, which is to say that symptoms are meaningless in an interpretive sense but not in an explanatory-diagnostic sense. Once repression takes place the free play of language-use ceases to be an available dynamic of the psyche of the speaker; rather, language assumes the status of quasi-causal mechanisms operating upon consciousness, closing down awareness of the self-constituting elements of subjectivity and the intersubjectivity of meaning. Habermas maintains that only a depth-hermeneutic can dissolve barriers to communicative freedom through the resolution of systemic and systematic disturbances. Symbols affected by quasi-causal mechanisms are not meaningful to the ego since they take on the function of automatic processes, divorced from the flexible capacities of the secondary processes. Habermas argues that hermeneutic understanding is inadequate to grasp such disturbances because it is limited to understanding within the realm of meaningful utterances. Although Habermas does not make this exact point, it is fair to say that from a communicative-theoretical perspective any hermeneutic attempt to understand distortions in speech that result from quasi-causal mechanisms will necessarily result in the misapprehension of their significance for the subject. It is Habermas’s view that only the technical sciences can offer insight into causal (natural) and quasi-causal (second nature) relations, insofar as these relations are distinctly non-subjective and therefore outside the grasp of linguistic understanding in the narrow sense. In contrast to the interpretive sciences, Habermas argues that technical sciences open up the realm of objective knowledge in this domain. Habermas’s innovative articulation of a depthhermeneutic argument over and against hermeneutics is the way in which he establishes the link between empirical-analytic and historical-hermeneutic forms of inquiry. For Habermas, psychoanalytic discourse promotes the fruitful union of both kinds of inquiry in the form of emancipatory praxis: the unity of theory and practice in self-reflection. For Gadamer, however, psychoanalysis is a specialized and clinical discourse, inappropriate when directly incorporated into politics or philosophy and certainly not a discipline exceeding either the grasp of hermeneutics or the universality of the phenomenon of understanding. For Habermas, psychoanalysis is a therapeutic discourse tailored for dissolving communicative


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blocks that, in the final analysis, must be understood hermeneutically. The combination of a reconstructive approach, dealing with communicative competence (accurate knowledge about facts and norms) and self-reflective knowledge leads to an explanation with practical implications since the theoretical explanation is itself a practical form of knowledge that can be integrated, more or less, into the totality of a life narrative. In my view, the question here is whether Gadamer and Habermas substantially disagree about the overall significance of psychoanalysis. While Gadamer sees psychoanalysis as an extension of hermeneutic inquiry, wherein the unconscious is not conceived as something that exceeds the grasp of artful interpretation, Habermas sees psychoanalysis as self-reflective praxis, the union of two independent logics of inquiry: technical and hermeneutic. From the outset, it should be mentioned that when Habermas conceded to Gadamer the clinical and professional uniqueness and limitations of psychoanalysis in relation to politics, he was really inauspiciously conceding a position that he never held.5 In fact, Habermas’s agreement with Gadamer did not even acknowledge that he held the position that his critics accused him of. In this sense, Habermas has reasonable grounds to say that his interpretation of Freud remains plausible. Despite this, and largely because of other concerns, Habermas has not found reason to explore psychoanalysis further. His shift in emphasis from a communicative reading of Freud to a reconstructive cognitive developmental model, drawing support from theorists including Apel, Chomsky, Mead, Kohlberg, and Piaget, has continued to occupy his theoretical interests. However, when Habermas concedes, in part because of Gadamer’s arguments against him, that there is a division of labor within psychoanalysis, dialogic and critical reflective therapy on the one hand and the reconstructive metapsychological model on the other, it becomes apparent that psychoanalysis becomes little more than a metaphorical unification of the technical and practical self-reflection of the sciences. For instance, in Habermas’s essay “Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason” (1985) he writes, “We need a theoretically constituted perspective to be able to treat communicative action as the medium through which the lifeworld as a whole is reproduced. Even from this vantage point, only formal-pragmatic statements are possible, statements related to the structures of the lifeworld in general, and not to determinate lifeworlds in their concrete historical configurations.”6 For Habermas, formal-pragmatic statements set up the possibility of providing ideal theoretical types. These ideal types are models that are divorced from experience, conceived of as anonymous rule systems in order to avoid the entwinement with historical contingencies that are typified by distortions and disfigurations. According to Habermas, these

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models allow us to rationally criticize pathological elements within language or social systems: Whoever wants to become reflectively aware of the individual totality of any individual biography or of a particular way of life has to recur to the perspective of the participants, give up the intention of rational reconstruction, and simply proceed historically. Narrative tools can, if necessary, be stylized into a dialogically conducted self-critique, for which the analytic conversation between doctor and patient offers a suitable model . . . This self-critique, which is aimed at eliminating pseudo-nature, that is, the pseudo-aprioris made up of unconsciously motivated perceptual barriers and compulsions to action, is related to the narratively recollected entirety of a course of life or way of life. The analytic dissolution of hypostatizations, of self-engendered objective illusions, is due to an experience of reflection. But its liberating force is directed toward single illuminations: It cannot make transparent the totality of a course of life in the process of individuation or of a collective way of life . . . Rational reconstruction subscribes to the program of heightening consciousness, but is directed toward anonymous rule systems and does not refer to totalities. In contrast, methodically carried out self-critique is related to totalities, and yet in the awareness that it can never completely illuminate the implicit, the prepredicative, the not focally present background of the lifeworld. As can be shown through the example of psychoanalysis, as interpreted in terms of communication theory, the two procedures of reconstruction and of self-critique can still be brought together within the framework of one and the same theory.7

One of the aims of the critical social theory, as Habermas presents it, is dedicated to a long-term scenic analysis of distorted forms of communication seeking, as an ongoing project, the emancipatory union of theoretical and practical interests. With regard to psychoanalysis it can be said that Habermas has not changed his mind about the possibility of demonstrating that psychoanalysis is a discipline that consolidates these interests. However, insofar as he has theorized psychoanalysis as split between its diagnostic-reconstructive and dialogic-interpretive moments, its unity must be seen as a metaphor. They can be “brought together within the framework of one and the same theory” but not without “proceeding historically.” The problem that is in need of clarification is whether there is really a substantive distinction between Gadamer and Habermas on this issue. In my view, if we take a careful look at what Gadamer and Habermas have to say about psychoanalysis and the distinction


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between practical and technical reason, it readily becomes apparent that there is in fact little for them to disagree about. To press the issue, one of the most significant misconstructions that both Gadamer and Habermas fall prey to, at least from the vantage point that will be pursued below, is their reading of psychoanalysis as a peculiar branch of medicine. Insofar as psychoanalysis is understood by Gadamer as the fulfillment of the life-history of the subject, the patchwork of reuniting what has become foreign, and, by Habermas, as therapeutically restoring systematic distortions of language within the communicative field, they are in virtual agreement with one another. Psychoanalysis, in terms of its practical effects, has to do with the synthetic reweaving of theoretical knowledge with the totality of a life history and narrative. In this sense, the radical incongruence of Gadamer’s notion of traditions that have become alien or strange and Habermas’s understanding of split-off symbols is not immediately evident. Although this is not made explicit, through their shared general construal of the psychoanalytic project both would seem to underestimate the potential of psychoanalysis as a medium of social critique and as offering a more radical understanding of subjectivity by limiting its insights into a privatized therapeutic relation. In this respect, Gadamer and Habermas’s understanding of psychoanalysis bears a close resemblance to what the Frankfurt School identified as conformist psychology. To situate this insight against Habermas, it can plausibly be maintained that he has not incorporated an adequate metapsychological theory as part of his social theory.8 In contrast to Gadamer and Habermas’s characterization of psychoanalysis as a branch of medicine, the Frankfurt School’s reception of psychoanalysis is far more robust and ambivalent. With regard to the insights of psychoanalysis Adorno writes, “The greatness of Freud consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contrary. He revealed the antagonistic character of social reality.”9 Psychoanalysis, at least for the Frankfurt School, “is a theory of an unfree society that necessitates psychoanalysis as a therapy.”10 Therapy, in other words, is not the proper aim of psychoanalysis but the symptom of an unfree society. The primary aspiration, or at least the theoretical veracity of psychoanalysis, arrives from its concern with truth, derived from experience without the prefiguration of what this experience ideally is. Freedom is a desirable aim, to be sure, but the link between correct theorizing and freedom is emphatic. Even Freud understood therapeutic “success” in an ambivalent way, a welcome side-effect of the analytic process, the transformation of “misery into everyday unhappiness.”11 Psychoanalysis is a theory of the psyche shedding

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light in its contradictory constitution, cognitive, but not necessarily practical in the individualistic emancipatory sense. Although one can only speculate why Gadamer and Habermas are led away from the rational and critical aspects of psychoanalysis, and why both have difficulty accounting for psychoanalytic theory within their frameworks, it may be due to their shared preconception that the insights of psychoanalysis are primarily limited to those of the healing or therapeutic arts. While Habermas seeks to do justice to the profound depth of the science of the psyche, his reinterpretation of Freud aiming to provide a cognitive model for psychic wellness stemming from the structure of the communicative relation, is in sharp contrast to the experience of communication for which psychoanalytic theory is tailored. The present argument does not at all dismiss the importance of the therapeutic ideals of analysis, but it would appear that these ideals must take on a different character in a social theoretical context beyond the clinic. Since Gadamer and Habermas read psychoanalysis as a therapeutic tool, even if social theoretical diagnostic elements emerge, neither would seem to be able to incorporate the Freudian field into their respective theories of the human sciences in an unproblematic way. As a discipline interested in truth and a form of inquiry which problematizes the objectivating perspective of science, the felicity of understanding, and the authenticity of self reflection, taking psychoanalysis seriously would entail substantial revisions to many of the key concepts deployed by both thinkers and would entail a withdrawal of their shared therapeutic reading of psychoanalysis. If, for example, psychoanalysis were to illustrate an anomalous relation between language and the unconscious, both Gadamer’s claims about the natural propensity toward understanding and Habermas’s conception of communicative competence would require rethinking.12 Although there has been a great deal of literature published on the Gadamer-Habermas debate, and given the comments above, it can be concluded that the comment by Jack Mendelson, that the full implications of the Habermas-Gadamer debate have yet to be drawn is equally true today.13 I think it is fair to say that most of the secondary literature runs in favor of Gadamer’s arguments or Gadamerian arguments against Habermas.14 Even Habermas’s most sympathetic colleagues tend to admit that there are problems with the excessively regulative or transcendental way in which Habermas formulates his critical social theory.15 Even Habermas himself, as Gary Madison notes, has become more willing to accept hermeneutics’ claim to universality.16 It is my position that the tentative proposals concerning the potential amalgamation of hermeneutics and critical theory in the form of a critical hermeneutics should be regarded as entirely problematic. Despite the fact


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that I have reservations about the way in which Habermas’s project takes shape, concessions to hermeneutics, such as shifting the focus of a depthhermeneutic or critical science to a critical hermeneutic, abolishes the unique and radical claims of a critical theory interested in freedom and happiness and the critique of domination by means of the self-reflection of reason.17 If the emphatic intentions and critical intuitions of the Frankfurt School theorists are to be maintained, as a critique of reason or critical theory of society, then the critical theorist cannot give ground to modified versions of hermeneutics. In other words, critical theory is stubbornly obligated as a critical theory to uphold a utopian impulse, the emphatic radicalization of enlightenment: critical theory cannot simply be a critical hermeneutics. This is true not only for its theoretical uniqueness, but also for its philosophical and epistemological coherency. The challenge is that the basis for this uniqueness cannot be arbitrary but necessitated by objective and normative concerns, practical interests. Theorists who attempt to engage critical theory in a closer relation to hermeneutics run perilously close to siding with a hermeneutical model, sidestepping the paradoxical nature of rationality that Horkheimer and Adorno heed: the entwinement of myth and enlightenment and the steadfast concern with the emergence of reason out of damaged life. From the vantage point of the critical theorist, the association of critical theory with hermeneutics is highly undesirable because the hermeneutic tradition is committed to understanding limited to the realm of linguistic meaning without comprehensive consideration of the possibility of a nonlinguistic substratum of subjective receptivity. In this respect, the debate between critical theory and hermeneutics remains radically undertheorized. CRITICAL THEORY AND HERMENEUTICS: MUTUAL CRITICISM Habermas attempts to demonstrate the thesis that hermeneutics remains limited by its internal philosophical assumptions by laying a broad foundation for a meta-hermeneutical theory of communicative competence. He notes that hermeneutics simply assumes communicative and linguistic competence without explaining it. With regard to distortions in language, Habermas argues that therapeutic intervention can be considered “true” if the interpretation is accepted and produces real results, the return of congruence between speaking and acting. Habermas’s theory of communicative competence serves to legitimate the claim that seeing through distorted forms of communication corresponds to psychoanalytic accomplishments in therapeutic discourse.

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Gadamer’s objection is that Habermas’s criterion of truth, at least as conceptualized in the depth-hermeneutic of the reconstructive sciences, appears to be metaphysical in origin: it “derives the idea of the true from the idea of the good, and Being from the concept of ‘pure’ intelligence.”18 Gadamer notes that such a depth-hermeneutic puts itself in the position of being “the keeper of the means of public information” and gives its supposed truth “the power of monopoly on public opinion.”19 From the perspective of hermeneutics, Habermas’s position appears elitist in its overestimation of the objectivity of the sciences. Habermas’s objection to Gadamer’s attribution of elitism is that only discourses residing in the public sphere are accessible to public criticism. Privatized forms of reasoning require specialized discourses. He argues that it is the task of philosophy to translate scientific discourses into everyday language, thus making privatized forms of reasoning open to public scrutiny. In other words, the strength of a depth-hermeneutic, its explanatory power, lies wholly in its acceptance by communicative participants who have taken up reciprocal relations by means of mutual understanding. By indicating that the results of analysis must withstand public criticism, Habermas protects himself from the criticism that critical theory is elitist. Second, Habermas notes that a formal pragmatic argument reveals the necessary assumptions of speakers, and is not regulative in its disclosure. Gadamer’s charge that Habermas overestimates the objectivity of the sciences to successfully reconstruct communicative competence, however, must further be clarified. Before discussing the coherence of Habermas’s understanding of the reconstructive science, it is worth drawing an analytic distinction between Habermas’s understanding of emancipation and Gadamer’s notion of openended dialogue. To be sure, one of the primary differences between Gadamer and Habermas can be detected in their divergent conceptions of emancipation. Emancipation, for Habermas, entails liberation from dogmatic dependence, a notion condensed in the idea of “communicative freedom,” dialogue free from domination. For Gadamer, emancipation, a term that he shies away from, is conceived in terms of overcoming and transcending that which has become estranged from comprehension by way of an internal open-ended engagement. Whereas Habermas sees emancipation as transcending the immediate sense-perceptions, including historical contingencies, through the power of good arguments, Gadamer views emancipation (if the term can be retained) as play, an ongoing spiral of learning, experience, and mutual criticism. The difference resides in the possibility of constructing an “ideal” relation between subjects. For Habermas, the utopian ideal of communicative freedom is built into the structure of communication itself since the structure


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itself is the product of social evolutionary development. For Gadamer, ideals themselves are caught up in a living historical context and should not be hypostatized abstractly. Utopian ideals are contextual and vary from time to time and place to place. From a Habermasian perspective, Gadamer’s hermeneutics appears to eclipse the context transcending moment of everyday communication, which is both normative and universal. Habermas argues that Gadamer sides with an unnecessary dependence on culture as the bearer of utopian energies. This dependence is problematic insofar as it limits the grasp of understanding to that which has become foreign by means of a semantic investigation. It is Habermas’s position that there is no “other” for the hermeneuticist, only provincial linguistic traditions can readily be approached. What is barred from the reach of hermeneutics is the realm of non-meaningful relations: labor and power for instance, but also the construction of anonymous competencies. From Gadamer’s perspective, Habermas radically overestimates the sciences, and further notes that his utopian ideal is ultimately ahistorical, separated from the experience of communication engendered in dialogue. Gadamer maintains that Habermas’s concept of an ideal speech situation is arbitrary and decontextualized, in the sense that it lacks a practical grounding in historical consciousness. Utopian ideals must be understood from within the context that they arise, and not abstracted from living histories. Habermas’s rejoinder to Gadamer argues that mutual understanding is normative, but normative only in the sense that any mutual understanding actually achieved is not above suspicion: any agreement reached must be recognized as a semantic agreement. Thus Habermas makes the distinction between the appearance of consensus (semantic agreement) and the reality of communicative freedom (mutual transparency in communicative relations). Habermas depends on the critical sciences to provide either affirmation or refutation of existing agreements, arguing that because Gadamer does not articulate a strong emancipatory theory the hermeneutic position is accommodating to any agreement that is reached without attention to the possibility of psychopathological (internal) or institutional (external) coercion. To be sure, Habermas’s argument against Gadamer is persuasive if, and only if, the instrumental power of science can in fact be used in a way that resists the tendencies of everyday communication toward rhetorical or semantic consensus by illuminating distortions in language where power and validity have been fused. What is at issue here is the explanatory depth of a technical form of rationality to successfully uncover systematic distortions in language by taking into account extra- or non-linguistic considerations such as labor and power that lie beyond ordinary hermeneutic inquiry yet structurally affect the conditions under which everyday communication takes place. Habermas

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argues that this is precisely the task of the reconstructive sciences and cites psychoanalysis as an example. Habermas notes that psychoanalysis makes the tacit assumption of relative transparency in communication coupled with technical insight into deep seated distortions in language inaccessible to consciousness, as well as translating such insights into a comprehensible or analogous narrative. Habermas argues that psychoanalysis is thus a discipline harboring the unity of theoretical and therapeutic relations: reconstructive and self-reflective, combining analytic-empirical insight with therapeutic praxis. Although such insight is restricted to the individual as such, the capacity of psychoanalysis to take into consideration the dramaturgical as well as the communicative clearly extends the reach of depth-hermeneutics to include the extra-linguistic influence of labor and power for which there is apparently no correlative in a philosophical hermeneutic inquiry. In short, Habermas argues that understanding can be extended beyond meaningful phenomena in a critically distanced and disassociated way. In response, Gadamer argues that Habermas has misunderstood the scope of hermeneutic reflection in his caricaturing of hermeneutics solely in terms of semantics and translation, contending that hermeneutics is falsely understood as being limited to the translation or transmission of experience.20 The object of hermeneutic inquiry includes labor and power, aspects of existence that can only be grasped and communicated linguistically: language is the medium of our being and “nothing that is can remain outside the realm of interpretation and intelligibility in which we have our common being.”21 In other words, labor and power cannot be understood apart from language and therefore always-already possess linguistic meaning, even if this meaning structure has become alien. Habermas’s contention that such phenomena are only open to scientific analysis is an incorrect understanding of Gadamer’s position, which Gadamer rightly objects to. Gadamer maintains that even aspects of existence which are not linguistic themselves, can still only be apprehended in language. Power and labor do not reside wholly in a nonlinguistic sphere insofar as they are constitutive of human experience. Gadamer’s further rejoinder to Habermas, that science cannot proceed without hermeneutic effort and that any encounter with reality demands interpretation and not merely revelation, is difficult to reconcile with Habermas’s claims about the monological disclosure of truth in the sciences when hermeneutics is considered in a broader sense, as linking our experience of nonlinguistic phenomena with linguistic understanding. Habermas argues for the procedural unity of an expanded understanding of rationality incorporating the task of translation from monological to dialogical understanding. Admittedly, this conception usefully enlarges the sphere of investigation


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for both ethical-political discourse and the technical sciences. However, Habermas’s thesis can be upheld only if his concept of ideology, as systematically distorted communication, remains intact along with the capacity of the sciences to disclose this dimension in a non-interpretive way; what Habermas identifies as “explanatory understanding.” In Habermas’s view, although it might seem that taking these forces into consideration does not exceed the grasp of hermeneutic inquiry, there is a monological aspect of science that yields insight into phenomena not readily open to a dialogical approach since its object domain is barred from the field of cultural meaning. Yet it does not seem that there is an insurmountable disagreement here with Gadamer. Gadamer emphasizes that the aims of science, as a meaningful activity, should not be understood apart from the effort to translate science into practical terms. In other words, the act of translation is tandem to scientific cognition. Although discursive participants begin and end in a hermeneutic situation, the rigor of science that Freud once noted lets the stones speak does not really move beyond interpretive boundaries, at least not in terms of practical reasoning of which technical reasoning is a derivative. What the facts truly are is meaningless apart from practical consciousness and awareness of their meaning for us. Gadamer’s point is that questions of objectivity and cultural meaning cannot be rigidly distinguished: the self-reflection of the sciences in critical theory is hermeneutic praxis.22 In order for Habermas to be able to refute the argument he must demonstrate that the monological procedures of the sciences are able to successfully transform and translate communicative and instrumental forms of reasoning into one another, and this is precisely what I am arguing that Habermas’s social theory cannot do. Habermas argues that science is grounded in communicative action, which is inherently anticipating mutual understanding. On the surface it is apparent that this claim is at odds with a scientific procedure that must claim a singular instrumentality for its cognitive or theoretical gains. Since instrumental rationality is defined in opposition to communicative rationality, the monological application of instrumental reason to an object of inquiry will inevitably have trouble dealing with questions of meaning that are socially constituted: this would include split-off symbols as well as petrified second nature. To put it differently, Habermas is logically required to acknowledge that the anticipatory-utopian dimension that is inherent to communicative relations is not to be found as inherent to instrumental reasoning. Habermas theorizes instrumental reason as parasitic on communicative forms of reasoning, rationality operating in a private way. As such, instrumental reason is not subject to a communicative structure in itself; the utopian ideal only applies

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to the communicative use of reason, not the instrumental use of reason. Thus drawing on the reconstructive sciences in order to claim validity for a theory of ideology depends on a non-utopian use of reason. Although Habermas argues that this can and must be translated from its monological form, it becomes evident that there must be a break between the emancipatory interest underlying communicative reason and its instrumental application. In short, the utopian dimension guiding the practical sciences disappears when the technical sciences are relied upon; this irreducible relation severs Habermas’s claim that the two interests, technical and practical, can be united. The relation is self-negating insofar as they cannot be seamlessly translated one into the other. Thus, Gadamer’s claim that Habermas’s theory depends on a utopian dimension, which hopelessly severs emancipatory practice from meaningful relations between existing human beings, is correct if Habermas’s guiding ideal for such procedures is sufficiently distanced from lifeworld practices; this is exactly what happens in the transition from communicative to instrumental reason. It is worth asking with Gadamer: Does the radical self-reflection of the sciences that Habermas argues for contradict or transgress the very meaning systems that constitute any possible orientation in language within a given community? Is science a self-alienating activity if understood as a monological project? My point is that if one pursues a monological inquiry far enough, it will inevitably sever its own connection to human interest. According to Habermas’s analysis, scientific procedures are, if consistent with their internal logic, “end-indifferent” and therefore at least somewhat divorced from practical concerns: scientific proceduralism must therefore escape a meaningless and destructive teleology and the rigor of its own consistency if it is to remain practical in relation to the lived history of the participants. Gadamer’s emphasis on rhetoric and the production of meaning is therefore completely appropriate. When considered consistently, the capacity of the empirical sciences to accumulate knowledge can be shown to be subject to their own internal negation through a rigid adherence to the monological procedures of technical control. It becomes necessary from within Habermas’s framework to withdraw the sciences away from their calculating efficiency in order for them to be able to be bound up with a political horizon and a specific ethical interest that is non-reifying. Without the link between practical and technical interests, or reflective comprehension of these interests, science runs the risk of rendering its own activity unintelligible. In order for Habermas to overcome the universality of a philosophical hermeneutics, he must paradoxically theorize the technical sciences as having a power that transcends this


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very connection. In a way, a depth-hermeneutic, as Habermas understands it, would culminate in the opposite of its original intention if ruthlessly pursued. The problem is that this kind of transcendence is illicit on Habermas’s own terms. Just as in the dialectic of modernity there can be no homecoming, Habermas also argues that knowledge never achieves an authoritative measure, since it is held together only through continual discursive reproduction which goes hand in hand with cultural reproduction. While Habermas’s aim is to overthrow the reductionism of hermeneutics by linking up historical or aesthetic experience to the vicissitudes of society and culture scientifically comprehended, it is not clear, even within his appropriation of psychoanalysis, what the relationship between science, as the last meta-language, and cultural meaning is. Habermas does at times seem to be explicitly aware of this problem. In a passage from his more recent writings on popular sovereignty (1988), which is strangely reminiscent of his comments regarding fantasy and the good life from Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas writes: The fact that everyday affairs are necessarily banalized in political communication also poses a danger for the semantic potentials from which this communication must still draw its nourishment. A culture without thorns would be absorbed by mere needs for compensation . . . The moment of unconditionality insistently voiced in the context-transcending validity claims of everyday life does not suffice.23

Habermas seems implicitly aware that rationalization in accord with publicly conceived interests lends itself to a “joyless reformism.” Indeed Gadamer’s argument about the blind utopianism of critical theory stresses exactly this dilemma, which is why Gadamer responds to adamantly to Habermas’s claims about the power of the reconstructive sciences. Apart from the problem of inadvertently severing the accumulation of knowledge via the reconstructive sciences from human interests in the attempt to overcome hermeneutics, it should also be noted that Habermas’s social theory is explicitly indebted to the context-bound immanence of the liberal-democratic tradition in a way that resembles the concept of historical prejudice that Gadamer upholds in Truth and Method. It is my contention that these two problems are related. If this is the case, then Habermas’s social theory is guilty of the offence that he charges Gadamer with, the privileging of prejudice. For instance, Habermas has long argued that the context of the lifeworld must meet the rationalizing procedures of deliberation halfway. He writes, “Only those forms of life that meet universalist moralities halfway

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. . . fulfill the conditions necessary to reverse the abstractive achievements of decontextualization and demotivation.”24 If this is the case, then critical theory is historically dependent upon one specific set of conditions through which to articulate its own conditions of possibility and this prejudicial structure remains prejudicial insofar as a democratic ethos is not completely transparent to itself. In this sense, Habermas’s theory is conservative on its own terms because it relies upon, and to some degree justifies, an existing state of affairs through which it articulates its own legitimacy.25 This is most clearly evident when Habermas argues that existing democratic structures instantiate the necessary conditions for communication free from domination.26 Ultimately this dilemma amounts to a defensive circularity with regard to the question of the grounding of Habermas’s critical theory, suggesting that Gadamer’s hermeneutic model might be more appropriate. However, in a tangled way, Gadamer’s contention that Habermas’s theory harbors an unrealistic and excessively abstract utopian dimension applies equally to his own argument. When Gadamer posits for a philosophical hermeneutics the singular unity of tradition, the idea that all forms of communication are oriented by the attempt to understand, he implicitly imbues hermeneutics with a presupposition and dependence on a particular methodology of interpretation; the possibility of a correct and incorrect understanding, which is undoubtedly a normative assumption. Gadamer’s holistic approach depends on a smooth fusion of horizons, one that Habermas rightly objects to. This fusion can only be achieved if hermeneutics is reduced to a methodological approach, one that narrows out the contradictory aspects of dialogue through the application of hermeneutic rules. Effectively, Gadamer commits the same fallacy that he charges Habermas with. The theoretical revival of prejudice is also the recuperation of a specific utopian horizon particular to the ideals of a specific tradition, the idea that all that need be possessed for overcoming that which has become strange is already at our fingertips. This cannot be formulated outside of a closed procedure that, in one way or another, sets out proper and improper guidelines and predetermines, to some degree, what a rational interpretation of “being” is. Such a closed methodology risks becoming impractical. The utopian assumptions on the part of Gadamer and Habermas, from which an ideal model of subjectivity can be derived, does not do justice to the psychoanalytic insight that even in the most intimate discourses the subject is confronted with and constituted by something in language that is radically uncommunicative in itself: the object, other, image. Just as we encounter another speaking subject, we also encounter a thing. It is not that the dialogue in which we are is incomplete, or that all foreshadowed forms of subjectivity


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are inaccurate or imaginary, but the way in which subjective understanding itself is entwined with an irreducible and opaque element that is constitutive for its own conditions of possibility. The ground of language is imaginary, and it is through the imaginary that language and its reception is articulated at all. While certain aspects of the imaginary are shared, the individual speaker articulates her or his voice through the highly idiosyncratic frame of phantasy. In this respect, Gadamer’s claim for the telos of language, that “even immoral beings try to understand one another,”27 engenders, despite his protests, a Kantian common will of sorts which limits intentionality to a certain and definite form of subjectivity.28 We are left, then, in the strange situation of facing not just one or two contrary arguments without an adequate resolution to the problem, but an entire series of arguments that are highly entwined and difficult to unravel. Simply put, Gadamer and Habermas share a mutual problem. To condense this dilemma, Habermas proposes a procedural form of hermeneutics, a depth-hermeneutics, which claims to elude the grasp of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics by drawing attention to the significance of communicative competence always-already assumed by participants in dialogue trying to come to an understanding and agreement with one another. The problem here is this: Habermas’s conception of the monological sciences, the reconstructive sciences in particular, is, and it can be no more than, a critical hermeneutics unless it becomes precisely what Gadamer criticizes, radically utopian and raised above historical contingency, severed from human interest. Likewise, Habermas’s critique of Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice is also correct, insofar as the immediate context of agreement is in danger of being false. For all the arguments exchanged otherwise, Habermas’s theory of communicative action cannot really depart the pivotal role of understanding and interpretation in dialogue that Gadamer emphasizes and hermeneutics cannot be reduced to the transmission of cultural knowledge. Even if monological sciences are able to uncover presuppositions that lie behind everyday awareness, these findings would be incomprehensible outside of ordinary language if, in fact, science proceeded in a purely instrumental form. The question of translation would be irrelevant since the procedures of science would entail severing any connection to human interest and, perhaps, human perception: threatening to resemble the very technocratic dystopia that Habermas warns against in his book Legitimation Crisis. Thus Habermas misunderstands the emancipatory insight as one that belongs to the critical sciences uniting technical and practical reasoning; emancipatory insight resides in the practical sphere as do the technical sciences. The following comparison can be made: Habermas argues, against Gadamer, that the

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sciences can proceed in a monological way, meaning that the insight of the sciences is not restricted to the realm of intersubjective relations. However, in Habermas’s later work, he notes that the one who consistently withdraws from the web of intersubjectivity risks suicide or schizophrenia. Habermas notes that the retreat to the monadic isolation of strategic action is, in the long run, self-destructive.29 Oddly enough, this is exactly what is required if Habermas’s argument against Gadamer is to succeed. In this sense, Gadamer’s objections to Habermas’s understanding of the critical sciences, that such sciences do not escape the realm of interpretation, are agreeable. Monological science and critical reflection do not exist on a higher plane of comprehension or abstraction; rather, they are embedded within systems of meaning and historical context. In effect, Habermas’s position is weakened when he argues for the limitations of hermeneutics and the autarky of science. Gadamer’s critique of Habermas’s understanding of science as radically separate from the grasp of hermeneutics, by way of harboring a utopian dimension which leads him to posit the explanatory success of science as monolithic, is correct. Once the utopian aspect of Habermas’s understanding of science is uncovered, it becomes possible to see the way in which the apparently transcendental status of science actually reflects a partiality towards one specific historical-political tradition. Thus it can be said that Habermas’s critical theory resembles, to a high degree, Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Nevertheless, the argument Gadamer uses against Habermas also applies to his own position. While Gadamer’s hermeneutics remains sensitive to critical-aesthetic insight, the extra-linguistic phenomena grasped within language, he also, at the same time, grants a privileged place to the reading of cultural traditions as singular. In effect, Gadamer’s argument about the utopianism of Habermas also applies to his hermeneutics as much as it does critical theory. In the end, it would seem that Habermas’s use of psychoanalysis, as a reconstructive science and a self-reflective dialogue, to refute the universality of hermeneutics runs into substantial limitations in a way that is similar to the limitations of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. UNDISTORTED SPEECH AS A TRANSCENDENTAL ILLUSION? As Thomas McCarthy observes, Habermas’s project has the advantage of a critical social science beginning with interpretative categories, the self-explication of social actors in “prescientific situations,” but not stopping with these intuitive categories.30 Critical social theory addresses the utopian content immanent to the liberal-democratic tradition by identifying the dialectic of progress in the application of social science to social life. However,


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Habermas does not simply address the political ideals of liberal democracy as they are available to us through interpretive or decisionistic theories of justice or the good life, but through a reconstructive science systematically identifying, after a hermeneutic beginning, the way in which the dynamics of moral-practical consciousness immanent to the self-formative processes that constitute and sustain self-consciousness cannot be anything other than liberal-democratic.31 The fact that a theoretical framework outlines the necessary immanence of a particular historical tradition as the foundation for critical inquiry should give reason for a pause, since it is on this point that Habermas departs the procedure of immanent critique by issuing an affirmative statement about existing historical and political forms by means of a theoretical argument pertaining cognitive development. Aside from the obvious problem of shifting from developmental psychology to political philosophy, the question worth pursuing is whether the political philosophy of the liberal-democratic tradition that Habermas makes reference to is particularly vulnerable to a transcendental illusion, the illusion of “pure subjectivity.” If this is the case, then it is also true that situating liberal-democracy as the institutional culmination of moral-practical consciousness is an idealistic illusion stemming from a hypostatization within a particular stream of political theorizing. In other words, it could be argued against Habermas that the latent political philosophy underlying liberal-democratic traditions is not the last meta-language of a political utopia but simply one strand of numerous modernist social imaginaries.32 As I see it, the danger here is not so much that Habermas overestimates the capacity of reason to clarify complex human relations, as Gadamer argues; rather, the problem lies in two places. One on the level of social psychology and cognitive development, the theorization of the bifurcation of instrumental and communicative rationality in particular. The other pertains the way in which the anticipatory-utopian ideal uncovered in Habermas’s formal pragmatic analysis takes shape. As Habermas argues, the structure of communication emerges from the evolution of our cognitive development wherein communicative rationality, and the utopian ideal inherent to the performance of speaking, is tied up with human nature on the one hand and our institutional structures on the other. When taken together it seems quite strange that the utopian horizon that Habermas situates at the centre of his critical theory is so utterly subjectless: springing forth from our natural capacities on the one side, an argument which is illicit on Habermas’s own terms, and from the institutionalization of the liberal-democratic tradition on the other side, an argument which contradicts his criticism of Gadamer. Furthermore, the distinction between instrumental and communicative reason rests on the reifying tendency of the

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former and the non-reifying tendency of the latter. Habermas argues that systematic distortions in speech, speech that has become inundated with libidinal energies, can be corrected by means of therapeutic intervention, the combination of technique with hermeneutic dialogue. This combination is what Habermas calls a depth-hermeneutic. Depth-hermeneutics is the unity of technical and practical sciences, the self-reflection of science. In short, the unity of technical and practical reason is the unity of instrumental and communicative reason. However, according to Habermas, the context-transcending force of communicative rationality is grounded in the structure of communication, having argued that social labor (the other possible alternative for grounding this transcending force) has a parasitic relation to processes of social interaction. To borrow a recent phrase of William Scheuerman, what Habermas must demonstrate is that the communicative alchemist produces gold.33 Instrumental rationality and communicative rationality must be conceived as being interchangeable: this is a problem because the anticipatory-utopian moment of communicative action is unique to the structure of intersubjectivity, and is not to be found in instrumental action that has no reciprocal dimension. Although instrumental actions are guided by the intersubjective regulation of norms (even outlaws try to understand one another) it is not apparent that the instrumental use of power has an equivalent within the binding and bonding force of reasoning discourses. What I see to be the most important lesson of the Gadamer-Habermas encounter is the necessity of situating scientific insight within the context of a hermeneutic horizon. Science may proceed in a technical or monological manner, but the intelligibility of scientific activity rests on the possibility of translating the technical insights of science into practical knowledge. Habermas agrees that this poses a new problem for hermeneutics, but it should be clear that any such translation can only be partial and never complete. This is not a case of the unity of technical and practical reason, but a case of an incomplete translation of technical reason into a communicative form: the subordination of instrumental factors that cannot be translated. With regard to psychoanalysis, if we take Habermas at his word about the dynamics of systematically distorted communication, as unavoidably inundated with libidinal energies that have cathected to speech, speaking entwined with instrumental elements entails not just a single utopian horizon but, perhaps, an entire series of performative idealizations, some of them empowering and some pathological. It is wholly appropriate to talk about multiple modernist social imaginaries. The crux of the matter is that Habermas must arrive, scientifically, at one of these idealizations that holds as normative for all linguistic utterances. The problem is that he can only do so


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by falling into the same position that he criticizes Gadamer for holding: the morally questionable and theoretically illicit adherence to the entwinement of tradition and knowledge. Habermas does not consider that the normative ideal inherent to a liberal democratic tradition may itself be a distortion of communicative relations, a product of the prejudices of a particular strand modernist thought.34 Perhaps there is a relation here between enlightenment and dreams, or the dream of enlightenment. If dreams are wish fulfillments as Freud has argued, then the idea of undistorted language may best be understood as a symptom. The idea that undistorted speech is a symptom indicates that there is structural desire underlying its deployment as an ideal, one that could, in principle, become apparent through psychoanalytic inquiry. This does not discount its validity, but the validity of such a utopian image cannot be established in theory, it can only be adopted normatively and invoked from within practical discourses. In everyday speaking situations linguistic utterances are crowded with extra-linguistic elements ranging from fantasies, day-dreams, compulsions, gestures, to repetitious thoughts. To single out one of these elements, such as the idea of a progressive enlightenment by means of undistorted communication, as normative should be regarded as highly suspicious. What Habermas takes to be the universal core of communicative action might be the result of systemic distortions of speech, giving rise to the potentially dangerous illusion of “pure intersubjectivity.” To put this a bit differently, the normative ideal that Habermas argues is inherent to communicative action is symptomatic of a specific form of the democratic imaginary. While we might agree that there is an imagined other immanent to the liberal-democratic tradition, we can also inquire: is there only one ? Are we all bound by the same communicative-utopian horizon? Another question emerges here as well: Is it desirable or reasonable for subjects to strive towards actualizing the political and philosophical ideals of the liberal-democratic imaginary that Habermas has in mind, regardless of how logical or rational it might appear? Is it subjectivating for a moral agent to be communicatively competent? Might communication without barriers inhibit the formation of a stable identity to some degree? The question of the plausibility of an alternative model of democratic imagining must be addressed, but also the implications of translating an anticipatory-utopian projection into concrete political practice. It is therefore important for Habermas to sort out the degree to which critical theory can demonstrate that hermeneutical self-consciousness (ordinary language) can be translated into self-enlightening discourses (the therapeutic and critical reconstructive sciences) and translated back again, in the form of praxis, without additional

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injury to the subject (further alienation). How might rationalization itself disenchant the human interest in rationality stemming from the invigorating enchantments of the lifeworld? These questions do not seek to undermine Habermas’s (or Gadamer’s) stress on self-reflection or the priority of consensus or agreement; rather, my aim is to provide a critical supplement to the anarchistic core of a democratic politics.35 It is suggested here that Habermas’s claim that language is structurally oriented by a utopian horizon is a problem when considered to be the utopian horizon. This may in fact be a misdiagnosis of intersubjectivity, the critique of which is at the core of the human interest in reason. What seems to be a crucial issue in the Habermas-Gadamer exchange, one which neither theorist is much interested in confronting, and where they differ, is in the specific imaginary dimension of their utopian impulse and the way this affective aspect is related to knowledge and practice. For Gadamer, the ethical is found within our communal relations, instantiated as the harmony between people living and sharing together, an idea that he makes more explicit in his later work. For Habermas, the ethical is expressed, implicitly, in the unity of our thoughts, actions and expressions. These two visions are not mutually exclusive but they are sufficiently divergent to have sparked serious debate. As Habermas argues, the reconstructive sciences provide technical information regarding the logic of the practical sphere. This information, once translated, has implications for both intersubjective and subjective relations. Philosophy, then, serves as a “stand-in interpreter” for the purpose of translating the objective sciences into practical discourses. In the view of Habermas, the idealized conditions presupposed in speech, illuminated by a theory of communicative competence, fill in the critical insights of an otherwise naive hermeneutic dialogue, by providing criteria for determining what a traditional consensus betrays: the unconscious effects of force and coercion. This is a criterion Gadamer insists is “shockingly unreal.”36 In response, Habermas acknowledges that the standard for rationality that he uses is a “counterfactual” one. The centerpiece of Habermas’s ongoing response to Gadamer’s criticism is the program of formal pragmatics, arguing that the notion of unconstrained communication is not unreal; rather, is implied as a possibility in any act of raising or redeeming validity claims. Defending his appeal to psychoanalytic theory, Habermas admits that the criticism of communicative incompetence, applied to one group by another, is not unproblematic. However, he maintains that the analogy between psychoanalytic and critical theories refers primarily to processes of enlightenment: to assist the critical theorist in promoting of self-reflection. Habermas writes,


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I can apply theories such as psychoanalysis (and the Marxist critique of ideology) in order to guide processes of reflection and to dissolve barriers to communication; the authenticity of the recipient in his relations with himself and with others is an indicator of the truth of the interpretation which the analyst (or the Party intellectual) has suggested. But I can also use this same theory to derive an explanatory hypothesis, without having (or taking) the opportunity of initiating communication with those actually concerned . . . In this case I must remain satisfied with the usual procedures of scientific discourse: for example, whether the patterns of communication identified as pathological are repeated under specified conditions or change under other conditions, which permit one to assume that a process of reflection has taken place.37

Gadamer’s primary objections stem from his emphasis on the historicity and practicality of language and dialogue and to the frankly utopian dynamics of Habermas’s critical social theory. It has been argued above that both of Gadamer’s insights do in fact apply. However, it has also been suggested that Gadamer’s hermeneutics falls prey to similar problems, which is why a possible union of critical theory and hermeneutics in the form of a critical hermeneutics remains suspicious. In short: what remains unexplored in both Habermas’s version of critical theory and in Gadamer’s hermeneutics is their positing of constraints and rules of discourse that apply a priori to the phenomenon of understanding, history, and its relation to enlightenment. In other words: what Gadamer identifies as ontology and Habermas as pragmatics are equally governed by a transcendental schema (fantasy) which remains unelaborated and unaccounted for in their own theoretical frames. As suggested above, the persuasiveness such schemas can only be accounted for in terms of a theory of the imaginary for which psychoanalysis is most suitable. THE METAPHORICAL REMAINS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS Despite the controversy between Gadamer and Habermas, it is not readily apparent that hermeneutics and critical theory are at inherent odds with one another. As several commentators have pointed out, there are widespread similarities between critical theory and hermeneutics and, at times, their disagreements seem to be as exaggerated as their mutual criticisms. In what follows the general congruency of Gadamerian hermeneutics and Habermasian critical theory is assumed. Given the development of their theoretical edifices the conclusion I have reached is that the divide between hermeneutics and critical theory is more of a conflict of interpretations than a substantive partition.

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As noted, Habermas’s general appropriation of psychoanalysis remains a vital part of his communicative theory, as a therapeutic dialogue and a reconstructive science. It is also important to note that his understanding of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic dialogue is completely congruent with his understanding of the modern relation of human beings to nature, art, happiness, and religion. All such relations are, according to Habermas, private; in the sense that they do not in principle admit, on a discursive level, of universal interest, generalization, or validity. At the same time Habermas acknowledges that nature, art, and religion are virtually irreplaceable, perhaps necessary as supports for the banality of communicative politics and the empty rationalization of the lifeworld. I would like to follow up on this point since it can be usefully elaborated in the context of the Habermas-Gadamer debate, and because it is through Habermas’s reading of Freud that insight into this problem can first be detected. To return for a moment to the popular dismissal of psychoanalysis as an invaluable discipline within critical theory: Thomas McCarthy, after summarizing the relation of psychoanalysis and critical theory in Habermas’s work, agrees that there is a danger in a strict application of clinical psychoanalysis to political activity. In particular, he asks, “What would correspond to ‘working through’ and ‘transference’ at the political level?”38 Perhaps, he notes, “we have taken the model too literally, and there is no need to find a correlate for every feature of the psychoanalytic situation.”39 For critical theory, psychoanalysis “serves primarily to highlight the normative goals of enlightenment—self-emancipation through self-understanding, the overcoming of systematically distorted communication, and the strengthening of the capacity for self-determination through rational discourse—as well as the standards of validation for critical social theory—ultimately the successful continuation of self-formative processes on the part of the addressees.”40 Psychoanalysis, it would appear, is little more than a metaphor for the interest of enlightenment and the self-formative processes of socialization and individuation.41 Although McCarthy is surely correct that the correlation of psychoanalysis to political activity presents a problem, as Habermas, Gadamer, and others have mentioned before him, the gist of McCarthy’s comments suggest that psychoanalysis offers us nothing other than a nicely wrapped package of intuitive insights. If we follow the suggestions of McCarthy, to pass psychoanalysis to the side, then psychoanalysis has nothing to offer critical theory that cannot be accomplished elsewhere. This is certainly indicated by the theoretical path that Habermas has chosen, a path now finding itself aligned with theories of cognitive development (aside from scattered passing remarks about the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis). It is fair to ask: What


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is so wrong with Habermas’s interpretation of psychoanalysis that it had to be cast aside or subsumed within a theory of social evolution and cognitive development? The fact that Habermas does not at all disown psychoanalysis, and the fact that it continues to play a singular and irreplaceable role in his social theory, combined with the idea that it now takes on a metaphoric role, seems to be a rather quirky kind of an anomaly needing to be explained. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND NARRATIVE RECONSTRUCTION Jay M. Bernstein has articulated one of the most provocative and insightful critiques’ of Habermas’s social theory to date, arguing that in relation to psychoanalysis Habermas exceeds his self-appointed task in his appropriation of Freud by over-determining what needs to be accomplished for a critical theory. In contrast to other arguments that can be raised, whether concerning a misappropriation or distortion of Freud’s work, Bernstein argues that Habermas’s appropriation of psychoanalysis goes beyond its intention and, in this, provides a more powerful and radical model for critical theory than has been recognized.42 However, in doing so he notes that Habermas fails to acknowledge the very insight establishing links between narrative, selfknowledge, hermeneutics, and the project of critical theory. Following up on a missed opportunity, Bernstein highlights the irreplaceable and systematic significance of aesthetic self-disclosure for critical theory. Bernstein begins by noting that the critical element of Habermas’s formal pragmatics can be sustained only if a universalistic and transcendental moment is not merely presupposed but also actually present in depth-hermeneutical practice. In Bernstein’s view, this transcending moment, what Habermas calls the structural and pragmatic idealizations inherent to communication, is both required for a depth-hermeneutic argument modeled on psychoanalytic theory and is incompatible with it.43 This incompatibility results from the inevitable role of narrative self-understanding in Habermas’s linguistic reading of psychoanalysis. Because of its narrative element, Bernstein argues Habermas’s depth-hermeneutics remains well within the bounds of a critical or philosophical hermeneutics: historical, contextual, and productive.44 As Bernstein explains, Habermas’s hermeneutic is always a double hermeneutic: we come to understand the meaning of a deformed language game while at the same time providing an explanation for the origin of this deformation. For Habermas, psychoanalysis is a discipline that provides a model of the union between narrative and uninhibited cognitive development through an interpretation of the life history of an individual that has become alien from them. This is not simply an interpretation but a specialized form

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of reading perplexing social phenomena, such as the repression of the intersubjective basis of subjectivity, as they have come to be constitutive of cognition. According to Habermas, the psychoanalytic interpretation is both universal and particular. It is universal in the sense that it provides an objective outline of the necessary stages one must pass through as part of ongoing cognitive development and increasing rationalization, and particular in that such stages are wrapped up in the unique and contingent life history of the individual. Thus Habermas sees in psychoanalysis the unity of the theoretical reconstruction of rational life with therapeutic criticism that makes such life possible. The universal aspect here is not only objectivating, it is also selfformative and simultaneously normative. However, as Bernstein points out, Habermas has unwittingly established a strange equivalence here. For Habermas, narrative praxis is strictly equivalent to the truth (validity) of the narrative form.45 Once an individual has returned excommunicated language to its proper place the subject arrives at the authentic truth of her or his life history. Truth, in Habermas’s schema, coincides with the universal features of cognitive development as soaked in contingency: no analytic diagnosis is true unless the analysand assumes through their voluntary acceptance and subsequent behavior its validity. Thus this unity is achieved in the form of narrative praxis; in order to avoid the authoritarian consequence of an analytic vanguard the truth of an explanation must be freely accepted by the analysand. Against Habermas, Bernstein maintains that narrative praxis thus conceived is an excess beyond narrative form by virtue of which the latter gains its cognitive validity. This means that the truth of a critical exploration of the life history of an individual can only redeem itself insofar as it is integrated into a particular life history, not as an alignment of an individual to universal cognitive structures. What is vindicated in this process is not a universal structure but the adoption of a particular narrative, a particular understanding of a given narrative history. Bernstein rejects the possibility of the acceptance of a narrative interpretation as strictly equivalent to universal cognitive structures of development as if by magical sublimation. As Bernstein notes, an analysis attains its cognitive validity only after its acceptance by the subject. This post-mortem of narrative history, as having at one time been carried by the Hegelian causality of fate, is tragic, depicting the lost opportunities of the subject and the failure of that which could have been. The excess here is the self-transfiguring praxis and self-creation of subjectivity that is part of the “self-possession of the subject” through an always already presupposed alterity.46 Bernstein argues that the reversal of symptoms, disturbances in language marked by split off symbols, is not an equivalent reversal: it is both a reconstruction and a creation. Subjects reconstruct and


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create their life history for themselves by identifying with the validity-basis of a re-description and re-understanding of their experiences. The emphasis should be given to the creative process of a renewed self-understanding rather than the exclusive return of something that has been temporarily barred. The adoption of a new narrative is generative and creative, transfiguring rather than simply restorative. Bernstein goes on to explain that self-reflection is predominantly, if not exclusively, either structural or narrative. In structural self-reflection we engage in self-evaluation measuring character and personality in terms of accepted norms (truth, rightness, beauty) or their suitability for realizing desired ends (happiness, the good life). In narrative self-reflection, however, we rehearse past events as turning points in a life history: “where pointless behaviour was, there narrative shall be.”47 Following Habermas, a generalized biography becomes an autobiography through its acceptance by the analysand.48 Bernstein argues that this realization, when “those who are made the object of individual interpretations know and recognize themselves in these interpretations,” corresponds most closely to the Gadamerian notion of a fusion of horizons.49 Habermas’s reconstructive theory is neither true nor false in its own right, but becomes true through its employment and assimilation with the assumptions of the subject: “what we learn from a consideration of these materials turns out to be something already known to us from the history of narrative.”50 Without this crucial point the explanatory sciences would remain monolithic with regard to their own insight and, as has been argued here, alienated from human interests. Bernstein draws from this point the conclusion that psychoanalytic theory is not properly a descriptive science at all; rather, “a practical science in which normative and empirical elements are ultimately linked through practice itself.”51 Habermasian psychoanalysis is thus misunderstood as a science offering a merger of narrative identity with an objective hierarchy of cognitive stages that subjects must articulate themselves through; rather, practical insight into narrative history lends itself to articulating the damaged life of the subject that forever contains missed moments where what could have been has failed to be, and this is precisely how freedom and responsibility are best understood. Such insights cannot be generalized and formulated within a structural or hierarchical model. I think Bernstein’s insight here accounts for the “existential dignity” of a non-defeatist attitude that Habermas sometimes discusses, usually in relation to Marcuse. According to Bernstein, this narrative creation and reconstruction is the cognitive insight of psychoanalysis understood communicatively. The critical insight here is that

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learning processes achieved through narrative should not be equated with cognitive development in the Habermasian sense. Ethical self-awareness and communicative freedom is not necessarily equivalent to Habermas’s conception of communicative competence in a formal sense. This point is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Thomas McCarthy’s criticism of Habermas’s incorporation of a “natural” developmental approach in his “overcoming” of hermeneutics. As McCarthy notes, at higher stages of moral cognition, particularly as developed by Kohlberg, the subject occupies the same reflective and discursive level that he moral psychologist does. The subject’s thought is now marked by the decentration, differentiation, and reflexivity that are the conditions of entrance into the moral theorist’s sphere of argumentation. The asymmetry between prereflective and the reflective, between theories in action and explications, that underlies the model of reconstruction begins to break down. The subject is now in a position to argue with the theorists about questions of morality.52

At this level there is no room for a developmental theory that cannot be contested by the very people it is designed to address. Moving back to Bernstein, the role of psychoanalytic theory is to give “shape and accent” to previous experience that is grammatically indeterminate, constituted by images and inchoate longings and desires.53 Accepting analytic suggestion and re-describing one’s past involves accepting a regimented and explicit revision of one’s current conceptual scheme. In a way, one narrative framework becomes subsumed by another through the explanatory strength of the new narrative in relation to the anomalies and failures of the previous narrative. In Bernstein’s account the retrospective construal of the significance of events entails a transcendence of the narrative employment of events beyond their former meaning. In a self-reflective narration, transcendence folds back on the narrating itself as an interpretive reconstruction.54 To this end, the subject imaginatively and retroactively instills meaning and significance into the events of their life history. Although Bernstein does not question Habermas’s broad idea of a depth-hermeneutic, he does radicalize a central idea within Habermas’s approach: “to take the implicit disturbances in ordinary practice as the experiential basis for the reconstruction of those practices that can reveal a structural or systematic deformation of them that is not a conspicuous component of their explicitly understood intersubjective grammar.”55 Bernstein argues that it is inappropriate to say that reconstructive science or critical social science ever attains theoretical knowledge, since any knowledge of this


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sort must make essential reference to modes of human activity, the direct and concrete identity of the agents and their social practices.56 Even if the reconstructive sciences yield insight about objective processes of self-formation, these insights can only be rendered meaningful through their narrativistic, rhetorical, and aestheticized sublimation. To elaborate this point, Bernstein draws on a dialectic of creation and discovery: Because human beings are self-interpreting, self-transforming and self-transfiguring beings, then in these cases what is discovered has a double accent: we can see ourselves differently only by interpreting ourselves differently, becoming different (kinds of ) persons than we were before—which equally must be a condition for fundamental discoveries in science and art. In this light, social science and psychoanalysis will appear to be philosophical rather than empirical theories; the condition of social or psychological explanation involving the creation/discovery of a new sense of what being a person (socially or psychologically) is. Viewed in this way, notions like class, the unconscious, the Oedipus complex are neither straightforward theoretical entities (the realist hope) nor logical fictions useful for the sake of explaining recalcitrant phenomena (the instrumentalist despair), but possibilities for further articulating essentially indeterminate experiential fields.57

Observing that Habermas’s reading of Freud is consistently governed by structures drawn from Hegel, where repression and its overcoming are situated in terms of the causality of fate and the dialectic of moral life, Bernstein notes that for Habermas pathology is the becoming substance of the subject and “the talking cure” is the return in which all that is substance is understood as belonging to the subject. Bernstein argues this movement is doubly mediated: the analyst can only have knowledge of the object if the analysand transforms her or himself into a subject, and the analysand can only do this if they recognize in the analyst, through the transference, their suppressed life. Hence, transference becomes the scene of the speculative recognition of the self in otherness (it should be noted that a clinical setting is not a necessary requirement for this to happen).58 The recognition of self in alterity, set in the stage of transference, is not the sublimation or dissolving of otherness, but its acceptance as ground. The intersubjectivity which sustains and produces subjectivity objectively is aporetic: a dialectic of fate, recognition, and tragedy.59 Bernstein argues Habermas is wrong to replace historical experience with a transcendental or presuppositional structure. This move toward anonymous rule systems instead of narrative is unnecessary since it is our social practices

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and ethical identity that are at stake in the Hegelian “causality of fate” and not the presupposition of communication free of constrains. Bernstein notes . . . the force of unconstrained communication in Habermas is always parasitic on its being a transcendental marker for the ‘we’ which is the ground of each and any ‘I.’ In reality, however, this we, which is never just one, is constituted in and through practices which are ‘neither regulated by law nor at variance with law.’ No theory or set of theoretical presuppositions grounds or founds ‘united life.’ On the contrary, only that act that denies life reveals it. Our tragedy is that this revelation is not an empirical accompaniment of our acts. Because our tragedy has become unknown to us, so has our life.60

Even if undistorted communication is always presupposed as a possibility, it only has motivating and normative force if it is necessary for the possibility of maintaining oneself as a subject.61 As such, undistorted communication functions as a transcendental marker, but what is central to argumentation is not its presuppositional quality, but its self-conscious binding power. Thus again, undistorted speech may be one of several utopian images within modernity, yet it becomes effective in practice when, as Jessica Benjamin puts it, one takes ownership of a “desire of one’s own.”62 Bernstein offers two readings of Habermas’s argument: the strong reading, which maintains that the presupposition of undistorted communication is a necessary condition for self-consciousness, and a weaker reading. If the former is not the case, then the general pattern of self-referentiality no longer has a grounding function. Bernstein thus opts for the second reading, pointing out that the actual contents of the ideal speech situation is necessarily empty and can only be filled by a living subject, not a virtual or theoretical abstraction.63 This being the case, self-consciousness, the ego and alter, cannot properly be understood as an empty form (nature-in-itself ) and the simultaneous location of philosophical grounding (a fact of reason). Bernstein thus argues that Habermas’s subject of undistorted communication is a logical fiction: “Habermas attempts to rid himself of the problem of transcendental subjectivity altogether, but this he can manage only by an ellipsis in his argument which produces a rather evident petitio.”64 Contrary to Habermas, Bernstein argues that what we become emancipated from in the production of a self-reflective narrative are false views about goals, our desires, and ourselves. This emancipatory power is inseparable from the practical activity of the reconstitution of our self-identity. However, in moving through the form/content distinction which legitimates Habermas’s transcendental strategy


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and reveals a logical and conceptual fiction, then critical theory becomes all it ever can be: a critical hermeneutics.65 In this light it is evident that Habermas’s appropriation of Freud falls short of being a science in the strict sense. However, Habermas’s reading of Freud does provide the outline of a yet to be explored critical hermeneutics of reception and recognition. In this re-formulation of Habermas’s reading of psychoanalysis the fragmentation of the lifeworld of the subject can best be understood in a narrative sense. Through the theorization of the re-insertion of narratives in analytic or discursive self-reflection the creative subject can be viewed as living in shadows of communicative incompleteness, dialectics of assertion and recognition, dissolution and crystallization, creation and reconstruction. Admittedly, although there is great merit to Bernstein’s thesis, what needs to be emphasized and what goes beyond his immediate critique, is whether there is any uniquely “Freudian” contribution to critical theory. What we have in Habermas’s appropriation of Freud is a long and indirect route through psychoanalysis to reach the final resting place of critical hermeneutics which draws its utopian impulse from the possibility of creative selfdevelopment and an awareness of missed potential, the subjective lack of communicative freedom. In this we may agree with Bernstein’s challenge to Habermas: reconstructive science, despite its rigor, can be nothing more than a critical hermeneutics and must be understood along the lines of narrative praxis. It cannot be otherwise if its truth is won through its application and embodiment in the narrative and subjective acceptance of its validity. While Bernstein’s analysis summarized here productively contributes to the debate between Gadamer and Habermas on the question of psychoanalysis, it is also evident that the substance of psychoanalytic inquiry disappears. I shall take up the possibility of a psychoanalytically informed critical theory in the following chapters. Before this, keeping in mind Bernstein’s critique, I will examine Albrecht Wellmer’s re-thinking of the Habermas-Gadamer debate by way of a post-hermeneutic critical theory. TOWARD A POSTHERMENEUTIC CRITICAL THEORY Albrecht Wellmer’s essay “Toward a Critique of Hermeneutic Reason” reflects on the relation of understanding to truth, playing off the hermeneutic conceptions of Apel, Gadamer, and Habermas.66 Wellmer attempts to preserve the project of critical theory at a distance from Habermas’s conclusions while at the same time stepping away from hermeneutics, however critically or transcendentally conceived.

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Observing that “linguistic meaning has no objective being; it is not objectively present in the world in the way that, say, stones, trees, mountains, or electrons are,” Wellmer outlines three layers of linguisticality: the nonobjective being of linguistic meaning; the constitution of “reality” through language as objective reality; and the idea, in thought, of this reality existing prior to it being perceived and talked about as independent of language, perception, and cognition.67 This does not mean that the objectivity of things and events is dependent on language and their appearance in reality is merely an illusion. Wellmer notes, “It is the disclosure of a world in which there are things and events that depends on language, not the empirical-existence of that which can be stated in true sentences to be real.”68 To put it bluntly: the real is whether it is conceived as meaningful or not. While linguistic meaning does not exist as something present and objectifiable in a linguistically disclosed world, “the being of linguistic meaning is incommensurable with all objective being that is disclosed through language.”69 Wellmer outlines the relation of truth within meaningful linguistic utterances as follows: “an objectivistic understanding of the mode of being of linguistic meaning is one that comprehends the being of linguistic meaning by analogy to the objective being of what is disclosed through language.”70 Wellmer’s tripartite structure of linguisticality shares with Habermas a conception of nature-in-itself as a presupposition of thought. Since linguistic meaning is analogous to objective being and, in agreement with Gadamer, “talk of a meaning-in-itself of texts is meaningless,” it can also be said that to talk of nature-in-itself is meaningless.71 I argue that the implications in Wellmer’s reading are more nuanced than Habermas’s conception, and far more productive. Understanding, according to Wellmer, is “the correct apprehension of the meaning that is designated or intended by linguistic signs.”72 Since meaning has no objective existence, then the apprehension of the meaning of linguistic signs rests solely on a shared intersubjective relation that is continuously produced and reproduced within an existing social context. It is in this respect that linguistic meaning may be identified as having an imaginary existence: meaning is imagined, a product of conscious (and unconscious) thought. Meaning, although it has no direct correspondence with an object, leans on psychical reality, constituted by fixations, attachments, images, longings and so on. Meaning as inherent in language must be understood as the unfolding of narration, as world-disclosure and self-disclosure simultaneously. But, with Gadamer, meaning is always “for us.” Understanding, then, can be understood as the dialogical experience of a shared imaginary, however incomplete or partial. In other words, what is typically called “understanding” is probably


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misconceived as transparency in communication. It would be more accurate to say that understanding involves a moment of transference or attunement; mutual recognition is not simply “agreement” but is also part of an imaginary relation of transference between subjects. Hermeneutic reasoning, in this way, is not unlike the Freudian idea of “reality-testing.” When discursive participants engage in interpretation about a disputed meaning or truth claim, there is an attempt to settle imaginary differences, conflicts of interpretation. This does not at all imply that differences are not real; yet, at the heart of disputes within language also resides fantasies lived out in the narrative praxis of discursive participants. With reference to Husserl, Wellmer notes that “linguistic meaning, wherever it appears, is always already there, that at most it remains to be comprehended, expressed, understood, interpreted, translated, but in such a way that this act of comprehending, expressing, understanding, interpreting, translating adds nothing to the being of the linguistic meaning which is already present.”73 If I am correct about the imaginary basis of meaning, then there is a productive error with regard to Wellmer’s idea of the presence of meaning as “objectively present” or “already there.” It is here, I think, that Wellmer’s thesis needs to be inverted. Meaning is not “present” or “already there,” rather, meaning is an objective absence. If meaning is understood to be imaginary then it is not a shared presence which is encountered but a stark absence of meaning that we encounter—an absence that must be resolved if the absence in question is to have meaning at all, which is also to say that the social relation must be filled in creatively and generatively whenever it is encountered. The notion of meaning being “already there” is not an objective statement, but a conceptual expectation on behalf of the receiver and part of the rhetorical intention of the speaker. What is always already there is there only through the projection of an imagined substance which is then filled out by the semantic content of a particular linguistic utterance that we call the fullness of meaning. To elucidate the “mode of being of linguistic meaning” Wellmer argues that a linguistic utterance is understood when the hearer has “correctly comprehended what the speaker intended with his utterance.”74 He further notes that in cases where our understanding of something is unproblematized “we accept the authority of the speaker as the person who must know whom or what he meant or how he meant something.”75 In other words, the “authority” of a speaker is part of an assumption about competence as well as trust. In these instances Wellmer argues that there is an indubitable moment of “blindness” understanding. We simply accept the claim of the other in order to defer an infinite regress since we, in a finite discourse, cannot challenge

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the sufficiency or acceptability of every claim. There resides, in any agreement, a practical end point that is accepted trustingly. The point of blind understanding is not expressible in terms of a particular interpretation of an utterance because at this point the interpretation would consist in a repetition of the speaker’s words; understanding rendered explicit would amount to nothing more than a tautological parroting of what has already been said.76 This being the case, agreement can be said to exist, as Habermas argues, when two or more people share an identical expression of a linguistic utterance. The problem is that there is no real possibility of confirming the congruency of this shared meaning. It is plausible to conceive of an agreement between two people wherein the semantic content is identical but the underlying fantasy-frames which encompass such content are radically divergent.77 To phrase this in Adorno’s terminology, agreement is defined by identity and non-identity, the shared semantic content and the elusive non-identical meaning which cannot be doubted nor confirmed. The twist that Wellmer develops, against the Habermasian aim of synchronicity in expression and meaning, is the creative aspect of understanding, the way in which understanding meaning is both historical and productive at the same time. Wellmer conceives the irreducible intersubjective aspect of the production of meaning in light of an objective absence. Wellmer further qualifies his point by noting that this does not necessarily exclude misunderstanding and nonunderstanding. These things are incomprehensible without this “blind” moment of “mistaken certainty.”78 At the point of blind understanding, Wellmer notes, “we actually cannot doubt, because doubt can, as it were, find no purchase.” In short, an encounter with a word and its meaning, and the attempt to understand, is pragmatically unavoidable; meaning that adheres to linguisticality is the medium of cognition: if there is to be understanding at all then there must be something which both opens and restricts the possibilities of “meaning-something-with-a-word.”79 Wellmer maintains that the basis of indubitable certainties is constituted by the commonality of a language. He writes, “In everyday communication the understanding of utterances and the understanding of their situational reference are not two different things, but one; but such situational understanding is only the correlate to our own ability to use sentences of our language appropriately in concrete situations.”80 In order to have a meaningful conversation we must posit the commonality of language and, in order to understand, we must suppose that the subject (the other) knows (or could know) what we are talking about. It is the presupposition that someone knows or potentially knows what we are talking about that marks the


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particularities and experience of communication, what Wellmer also identifies as the performative aspect of language. What differentiates Wellmer’s position from Habermas’s is that Wellmer identifies this as a local and particular presupposition and not, as Habermas argues, its universality and its structure. Wellmer’s contention that understanding is situated relies on an “anticipation of the situational adequacy of what is being said (which, of course, leaves open the possibility of dissent), and it understands utterances as aiming at an understanding in the sense of agreement.”81 For Wellmer, the anticipation of the situational appropriateness is analogous to what Davidson calls “the principle of charity.”82 As can be seen in an inverted reading of Wellmer, the principle of charity is not really a principle at all but a context-dependent presupposition of two or more communicative participants. Such assumptions may or may not be shared. This is not a transcendental constraint, as a formal pragmatic argument would have it, but a particular modality of communication performatively enacted. An excellent example of this would be the strictures of gender performances: one has to be successful as a woman or a man.83 Wellmer further argues “that a hypothetical attitude toward validity claims, the positive or negative reasons for which are unavailable to us at the time of utterance, is only conceivable against the background of a decision about the possible meaning of an utterance in a concrete situation.”84 In other words, questions of validity only emerge in certain instances. “Validity” is a product of a specific kind of communication, one that is heavily dependent on the context in which it appears. We are not in all times and in all places raising validity claims, nor can we posit validity to be the ultimate evolution of rational speech; even if this is the case, it cannot be decided a priori (in theory) that the translation of everyday speech into validity claims is the paradigmatic mode of moral or scientific debate. The task of translating ordinary language into validity claims is not evinced prior to an actual translation: in principle is not in fact. Hermeneutic reflection on the meaning of an utterance can therefore be said to exist only in places where communication has “failed.” Only certain forms of communication end with understanding, which may or may not then move on toward agreement. Wellmer argues that consensus, or rationally motivated agreement, is “successful communication.”85 It is important to emphasize, however, that this “consensus” is always accompanied by an essential moment of noncomprehension, a blind spot in understanding which is required because of the nonobjective nature of meaning. For the purposes of a critical theory, this implies that consensus expresses both blindness and agreement simultaneously. From a critical theoretical perspective, consensus must

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be viewed as remaining unfinished, and quite possibly within the shadow of domination. Something more remains to be said because regardless of the apparent ideality of discourse there is no guarantee, nor could there be, of perfect understanding or pure intersubjectivity. Understanding, in this sense, is as equally welcome as it is potentially dangerous. Heeding Habermas’s warnings about semantic consensus, Wellmer’s contention that “the commonality (intersubjectivity) of linguistic meaning . . . is not something given once and for all . . . rather . . . it is something precarious and discontinuous: it is fragile, it is never complete, it is always to be restored anew in the process of linguistic communication . . .” is crucial.86 We can recall Wellmer’s earlier critique of hermeneutics: “that the ‘dialogue’ which we ‘are,’ is also a relationship of coercion and, for this very reason, no dialogue at all” (a concern that seems to have virtually disappeared in Habermas’s later writings).87 In his critique of Gadamer, Wellmer takes issue with the idea that “truth” is to be found “always already” in history. Although he admits that meaning is limited by the horizon of the participants, the truth-relation of meaning is not limited to “interpretation.” It is here that Wellmer departs from hermeneutics. The truth of a text is related to those who are reading it, and the constitutive elements of this truth are to be found or discovered in our past, as the object of correct or incorrect judgment. However, this creates a problem for the relation between truth and meaning: if meaning is historical and at the same time progressively created, “different,” Wellmer argues, truth must be understood similarly, in a dialectical way. Understanding, like truth and meaning, is produced or created and posited as historical. As a corrective to Gadamer’s view Wellmer argues that “truth” is not to be found in a semantic archaeology, truth is created and revealed by the participants as an orientation toward something meaningful: “a truth that has already ‘happened’ as world-disclosing can only ever be concretized and appropriated anew (and differently): understanding always means understanding differently.”88 Wellmer maintains that no text is safe from critical scrutiny, however “correctly” interpreted, and there is no conditionality for the presupposition of a singular meaning since meaning is always produced contingently. At the same time, Wellmer argues against Habermas that understanding cannot be grounded in the telos of an ideal communication community.89 To rectify the objections that Gadamer and Habermas might raise, Wellmer suggests a “double possibility of understanding,” distinguishing between “internal” or “immanent” understanding on the one hand, and “external” or “productive” understanding on the other.90 “Internal” understanding has the character of a Gadamerian “fusion of horizons,” the experience of being “enclosed with the horizon” or the “terrain” of the text: the


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language of the text becomes our language.91 “External” understanding, by way of contrast, has to do with the gesture of defamiliarizing; the way in which the interpreter “succeeds in transcending the text in terms of the text’s own truth claim.”92 Understanding in this sense is productive and critical in that the truth-claim of a text is violently displaced. Wellmer concludes that understanding is “the appropriate resolution of the tension between merely immanent and merely external understanding.”93 Resolution, then, implies a fusion of horizons, but also a doubling of the alien, the “feedback” of something external brought into the text. Wellmer writes, “The two imperatives are, so to speak, forcing understanding in two mutually opposed directions, by which I mean that understanding cannot be both receptive (or “just”) and distanced (or “constructive”) in equal measure.”94 This tension between two quantum points moving in opposing directions is very much like Jessica Benjamin’s image of the bird’s flying in two different directions as she applies it to self-other reciprocity (explored further in chapter five). Given that the two views outlined by Wellmer are mutually exclusive, the tension of which he speaks is a dialectical one that is “resolved” in understanding, between an “unproductive infinity of immanent understanding” and a “productive infinity of external understanding.”95 Wellmer ends his article by arguing that this “irreducible relationship” between internal and external understanding is what separates hermeneutics from a “post-hermeneutic” turn in hermeneutic reflection, noting that this must not be misunderstood as an expression of decisionism since it is contingency itself that guides our standards of reflection. The fact that “we cannot hope to evade the process of tradition, but neither are we enclosed within it” illustrates the dialectic of desire and fantasy, discourse and imagination.96 Furthermore, Wellmer remarks, hermeneutic reflection and “liberal culture” are mutually dependent, since it is only a liberal and democratic culture can understand itself in a way that “incorporates hermeneutic enlightenment and allows it to become productive.”97 CONCLUSION Habermas argues that the suspicious Enlightenment leaves no social practice unexamined. As such, we run into two problems: first, we cannot trust our ordinary language to be free from ideological distortion; second, we cannot trust the positivistic sciences to free us from this bondage. What is necessary is a self-reflective critical science with the capacity to reach behind ordinary language, through the strength of its procedural and methodological rigor, in tandem with a self-reflective hermeneutic. This procedure is also burdened

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with the weight of being able to ground its own insight reflexively. Habermas argues that psychoanalysis provides an appropriate model for this procedure, both as a meta-theory and as a depth-hermeneutic. Psychoanalysis, Habermas argues, is an example which provides a means to overcome systematically distorted communication, made conscious through a theoretical analysis of communicative competence, wherein the participants in a dialogue can free themselves from pathological distortions so as to coordinate their actions in an autonomous and non-ideological manner. Gadamer cautions that Habermas’s use of psychoanalysis is prone to objectivistic tendencies and that his understanding of critical science operates within a wider frame of hermeneutics to which Habermas, at least in his distinction between therapy and politics, agrees. With regard to the Habermas-Gadamer encounter, Gadamer takes issue with Habermas’s psychoanalytic depth interpretation as a method of critique. In this respect, Gadamer’s central concern with Habermas’s theoretical architecture has much to do with the adequacy of the ideal speech situation as a model of rational intersubjectivity, veritably asking the question: is the cultivation of common sense that grounds the faculty of judgment exercised within the range of traditional prejudices? In some respects Habermas seems to have answered himself in his essay on Walter Benjamin: Is it possible that one day an emancipated human race could encounter itself within an expanded space of discursive formation of will and yet be robbed of the light in which it is capable of interpreting its life as something good? The revenge of a culture exploited over millennia for the legitimation of domination would then take this form: right at the moment of overcoming age-old repressions it would harbor no violence, but it would have no content either. Without the influx of those semantic energies with which Benjamin’s rescuing criticism was concerned, the structures of practical discourse—finally well established—would necessarily become obsolete.98

Habermas acknowledges that the reinsertion of tradition is an essential condition of an emancipated life, suggesting, perhaps, the validity of a critical hermeneutics. Here, J. M. Bernstein’s analysis emerges as one of the most sustained and insightful criticisms of Habermas’s appropriation of psychoanalysis, shedding light on this problem. The problem that a critical hermeneutics faces pertains to the paradox of a non-hermeneutic dimension that is immanent to intersubjective understanding, a non-interpretive blind spot that adheres to any communicative practice. Wellmer’s critique


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of Habermas appears to come closest to grasping this point. What emerges is the possibility of a non-hermeneutic critical theory. Habermas’s theoretical framework, however, cannot account for this possibility; it is something that remains unthinkable. Following Wellmer opens the way for thinking through this dilemma. Wellmer’s intricate critique reveals the inherent blind spot in understanding, one entailed even in the more rigorous of discourses. Such blind spots in agreement rest on shared imaginaries, the analytic equivalent of transference in communication. Two developments emerge from this. First, the parameters of a non-interpretive moment in discourse need to be explored further. Second, it becomes increasingly apparent that Habermas’s notion of undistorted speech is a problem. Wellmer’s comments here suggest that a model of tense recognition is more appropriate. Despite the very real dissimilarities between critical theory and hermeneutics, I have suggested that psychoanalysis, at least as construed by the Frankfurt School, drops out of view in the debate because Gadamerian hermeneutics and Habermasian critical theory do not fundamentally disagree about the significance or scope of the psychoanalytic project. In contrast, it may be said that psychoanalysis presents us with a form of inquiry and corresponding insight that cannot be reduced to rhetorical persuasion or rational argumentation in the communicative sense. In this, psychoanalysis avoids the limitations of hermeneutics, however deep or critical, by way of incorporating and taking account of a distinctly non-hermeneutic and irreducible dimension of intersubjective relations. Only by taking into account this radically non-interpretive moment can a social theory do justice to the entwinement of linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena, desire and the unconscious, imagination and subjectivity. In taking up this perspective thematically, I am seeking to preserve the significance of psychoanalysis for critical theory and, simultaneously, defend critical theory against the tendencies of hermeneutic social theory toward assimilating objectivity or existence into narrative fields of meaning (however stable or unstable). Without taking into account this non-interpretive blind moment, critical theory runs the risk abandoning its more radical insights and leaving behind its animating force: an emancipatory theoretical critique of reason with practical significance. The problem is Janus-faced. This blind moment is unavoidable, but its critical measure cannot be assumed in advance. It is for this reason that two sides of this problematic must be explored: the recognition of the non-identical and the blind attunement with the familiar. In the remaining chapters both of these points will be discussed. With regard to the first, I will examine the significance of a concept of revelation or secular illumination as a moment of identification with the other (chapter

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four). The second point will be examined in the following chapter, looking to the work of Jessica Benjamin as the most articulate advancement of a theory of recognition that contributes to the productive development of a critical theory interested in its normative foundations and the self-reflection of reason.

Chapter Four

Of Reason and Revelation: Toward a Post-Hermeneutic Critical Theory

The previous chapter outlined a critique of Habermas suggesting that his critical theory is actually an unacknowledged form of critical hermeneutics. It was also argued that if the transformation of critical theory into a critical hermeneutics is the price to be paid for successfully making it past the linguistic turn, then it would also be the case that critical theory is little more than a stylized strategy of discursive or self-reflective phenomenological interpretation. While this transition might work toward bridging the overwrought gap between various modernist and postmodernist projects, this implication certainly falls short of the original aims of early forms of critical theory. In order to forestall this possibility, I think a turn toward proposals concerning a post-hermeneutic philosophy should be considered. The requirement of such a proposal rests on the possibility of articulating the significance of a non-interpretive moment as constitutive of subjective reception and intersubjective relations. This can be done in a speculative way by means of a materialist theory of revelation or secular illumination. In my discussion of the debate between hermeneutics and critical theory, I argue that both Gadamer and Habermas rely on a curative hermeneutic model of psychoanalysis. In the case of Gadamer, a philosophical hermeneutics that reconciles the estranged with the familiar; and, in the case of Habermas, a critical or depth hermeneutics that seeks to return excommunicated symbols or distorted linguistic utterances to their normal use in public language performances. In both instances psychoanalysis is understood as a form of restorative praxis. After the Gadamer-Habermas debate many of Habermas’s critics have tended to align themselves somewhere between both paradigms in what has come to be called critical hermeneutics. It is precisely this conclusion that I 117

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wish to avoid by articulating a post-hermeneutic critical theory, despite the fact that I agree with much of what Habermas’s critics have to say on this point; namely, that Habermas does not provide convincing arguments against hermeneutic reasoning. My rejoinder posits a materialist concept of revelation, utilizing insights from the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Slavoj Žižek. Revelation here refers to an experience that cannot be readily subsumed or grasped by hermeneutic inquiry without transforming the experience. This does not at all down play the significance of interpretation, which is an unavoidable rendering of experience. However, it does pose the need for considerations that problematize an overly linguistic approach, particularly in terms of the hypostatization of language and the imaginary and the appropriate means through which a more critical understanding of desire, fantasy, and language might be developed. It is important for me to emphasize that I have no wish to assimilate the insights of Benjamin, Adorno, and Žižek. Instead, I would like to situate the three trajectories alongside one another, Benjamin in terms of history, Adorno in relation to art, and Žižek with regard to language, in the attempt to demonstrate that a materialist concept of revelation can be approached from several directions simultaneously. To situate this differently, I am following up on Habermas’s postmetaphysical impulse without abiding by his conclusions. Revelation may seem like an odd choice of concepts, given that in its most productive form critical theory must avoid theological consolation and, at the same time, the nihilism of a wholly disenchanted world. However, it is here that a materialist concept of revelation, which I regard unequivocally as nontheological, might best be developed. Contrary to Habermas’s emphasis on discursive argumentation, a materialist concept of revelation can be shown to be a means of accounting for the way in which a revelation, elucidation, or shock dislocates and decenters the subject in relation to her or his network of symbolic or intersubjective relations. Keeping with the aims of a critical theory interested in a materialist concept of truth, a concept of revelation may be demonstrated to shed light on the way in which the imaginary informs or structures discourse as a formative moment in subjective and intersubjective relations. Such insights are not necessarily exhausted (nor could they be) by argumentative praxis. This concept of revelation remains faithful to an understanding of critical praxis for which desire or human interest, in opposition to the structural basis of norms outlined in Habermas’s formal pragmatics, serves as an anticipatory utopian moment. It is the contention here that neither Habermas’s depth hermeneutics nor the various versions of critical hermeneutics can adequately address this issue. The articulation of such a program is most coherently understood as a post-hermeneutic critical theory, critical

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theory that does not yield to the rather un-relativistic consequences of reality as nothing more than interpretation “all the way down.” My argument will be articulated in three parts. The first part examines what I am calling revelation through the aesthetic, psychoanalytic, and utopian motifs of Benjamin and Adorno. This will be followed by an analysis of the non-interpretive moment amidst intersubjective relations as theorized by Žižek. Finally, the concept of revelation introduced will be discussed as part of a critique of the normative foundation of Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. PROFANE ILLUMINATIONS AND DIALECTICAL IMAGES: WALTER BENJAMIN AND THEODOR W. ADORNO In contemporary philosophy it is quite common to associate any object of inquiry with the appropriate parenthetical remarks: qualifications regarding the kind of methodology that one is using, the theoretical assumptions at work, and the various subjective prejudices that may inadvertently negatively affect the overall investigatory results. In short, contemporary theory often begins with a predetermined object and some sort of hermeneutic lens, more or less accentuating difficulties that might arise from the outset and following this up with a meaningful interpretation of the object or events in question. It is the concept of interpretation as the sole means to ascertaining the truth and meaning of human experience that I think needs to be displaced; it should be noted that to displace is not to eliminate. I argue here that the approaches of Benjamin and Adorno, despite the agitation and theoretical gains created by the linguistic turn, can be seen to have somewhat paradoxically already embraced a post-hermeneutic perspective. For both Benjamin and Adorno the concept of interpretation is not strictly reducible to questions of meaning. This is why the idea of montage in Benjamin and Adorno’s work is often considered both a method and an interpretation. A close reading of Benjamin’s “dialectics of seeing” reveals, however, that his notion of “profane illumination,” along with Adorno’s notion of “shudder,” are not simply methodological or interpretive strategies. An interpretive strategy is a methodological approach that attempts to take advantage of a particular subjective viewpoint by bringing an object into view from a novel direction or perspective. Benjamin and Adorno, on the contrary, theorize the subjective reception and experience of the object as mediated by existing cultural exigencies. One of the philosophical aims of critical theory is to dialectically elucidate the reified reception of objects as undialectically mediated by categories, illustrating or representing the truth

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and falsity of categories by means of “dialectical images.” This can be accomplished philosophically or artistically; both, it is argued, can produce a shock of recognition. I argue that Benjamin’s understanding of the disturbance produced by representations or dialectical images and Adorno’s notion of the shudder allay hermeneutical enclosure by taking account of the disruptive fracture within meaningful expressions as well as scientific or analytic notions of causality.1 The exact relation of dialectical images to philosophical interpretation is one that caused a great deal of tension and difficulty between Adorno and Benjamin.2 While Benjamin argued that dialectical images held the potential to break through the phantasmagoria of commodity capitalism, Adorno maintained that this could not be done without an accompanying philosophical counterpart, a negative dialectic.3 Adorno was especially skeptical of Benjamin’s understanding of the “collective unconscious” as well as his potentially “undialectical” understanding of dialectical images. On the surface of this disagreement, Benjamin simply seems to be more optimistic about the potentials created by the intensification of mass reception within a commodified culture; he sees in this intensification the possibility of art “exploding” reified products from within, even though he shares with Adorno a distrustful outlook with regard to the course of human history.4 However, it can be demonstrated that there is a deeper issue involved here. Instead of emphasizing the differences between Adorno and Benjamin’s understanding of emancipatory possibilities within the products of the culture industry, I explore and elaborate on their conceptions of non-interpretive disruptive reception, what I have termed revelation. For this, the similarities between Benjamin and Adorno will be stressed. Benjamin did not outline a systematic critical theory. At best, his work is a haphazard collection of essays, letters, and literary fragments. Nevertheless, there are a sustained set of interests that characterize his writings. Of these diverse trajectories the image of awakening is prevalent. When Benjamin surveys the ruins of culture he draws on the vocabulary of psychoanalysis and equates the task of the critic of culture with that of an archaeologist; social critique is an archaeology of the imaginary of and in history.5 The archaeologist is not simply digging up fossils but activating a living subterranean impulse. Benjamin is interested in the blurry realm of waking life because only in the transitory waking state can the coincidence of the revolutionary imagination and the historical emerge simultaneously.6 Benjamin’s use of the phrase “awakening” as a means of dislocating the commodity form describes this critical exploration in a similar way to Adorno’s understanding of “objective vision.” For Adorno the culture industry is the ultimate filter through which all reception is determined and repressed.7 To speak of the


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utopian potential of commodities comes perilously close to an ideological justification of the existing social relations having historically brought commodification about.8 Although important, this issue will also be left to the side in order to emphasize a more remarkable parallel. BENJAMIN’S DIALECTICS OF SEEING Throughout his work Benjamin is concerned with the task of building a bridge between everyday experience and a materialist philosophy of history, articulating what Susan Buck-Morss calls a “phenomenological hermeneutics of the profane world” or, in a less cumbersome form, a “dialectics of seeing.”9 Although Buck-Morss uses the term hermeneutics here it must be stressed that Benjamin’s analysis of dialectical images cannot be reduced to the interplay of familiarity and estrangement. The shock of awakening that Benjamin discusses is a rupture or shattering of the phantasmagoria or dreamworld of modern culture, an awakening through the “Now of recognition.”10 Benjamin’s concepts of shock and recognition have more in common with a concept of revelation than with hermeneutics in the phenomenological tradition.11 Likewise, against a theological reading, it is characteristic of the Frankfurt School theorists to draw upon a radically secularized theological terminology.12 In contrast to the world of discursive or hermeneutic imagination, Benjamin was primarily concerned with nonlinguistic expressions; cultural rudiments such as architecture, fashion, human gestures, and photography take precedence in his reflections and observations. Benjamin is a philosopher of the non-essential, a collector of the remnants and unofficial forms of popular culture. Yet, in the ornaments of a commodified culture he perceives a forgotten human history or, more precisely, a history in the process of being forgotten. As Buck-Morss outlines, Benjamin is concerned with examining the utopian wish contained within the scattered ruins of culture: In the process of commodification, wish image congeals into fetish; the mythic lays claim to eternity. “Petrified nature” characterizes those commodities that comprise the modern phantasmagoria which in turn freezes the history of humanity as if enchanted under a magic spell. But this fetishized nature, too, is transitory. The other side of mass culture’s hellish repetition of “the new” is the mortification of matter which is fashionable no longer.13

Phantasmagoria is a concept having to do with the dreamworld of everyday life. For Benjamin, the modern world of industrial capitalism generates a

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phantasmagoria, a magic-lantern show of optical illusions akin to Marx’s use of the term to describe the deceptive appearances of commodities as fetishes in the marketplace.14 Contrary to Weber’s thesis of disenchantment, Benjamin argues that “the new” cultivates a paralytic beguiling where the new of progress becomes an uneven non-contemporaneous fetish, disenchantment becomes enchantment again. This quality is taken to be one of the defining characteristics of a system of commodification, the grasp of which very little escapes since even subjectivity is captured by its magic charm. Benjamin notes that in the world of commodities, subjectivity is viewed as a hindrance and human beings become commodified, treated as if they are objects for sale and exchange: “humanity is what you hang your hat on.”15 Benjamin maintains that anticipatory wish symbols are concealed within remains of a culture suffering from social amnesia, unconscious as it were; still, these remains contain traces of past culture creations: “Valuable things may be lying around, but nobody remembers where.”16 The problem is that the dreaming social body is not aware that it is dreaming. The social amnesia produces an immediate fetish or fixation on the present at the expense of the past, the delusional self-confidence of consumers who feel they have actualized the fantasy of progress in the now. In this false experience of immediacy, new technology comes to be mistaken for the proof of a living utopia.17 Every new product is an affirmation of utopia. This system of fantasy encourages human beings to resign themselves, or perhaps even celebrate, a depoliticized mythological fate, a hardened second nature, a tide of progress heralding anything that arrives as necessary and any suffering created as the growth pangs of enlightenment. The ideological sphere is a place where not even the hopes and the dreams of the dead remain safe from the forces of reification and consuming forgetfulness. Out of the remnants of culture Benjamin detects an explosive power ensconced by the barricades of a phantasmagoria, the congealed fetish of the here and now that relies upon the slumbering of recollection. Mobilizing the revolutionary impulse contained within the products and creations of society, Benjamin introduces the idea of “dialectical images.” Given the dreamlike quality of commodity capitalism, which Benjamin sees exemplified in the Paris Arcades, he contends that the utopian imagination of the wish image needs to be set in a configuration or montage, a representation figured to reveal a profane illumination as a necessary countermove against the devouring mythology of progress. The technique of montage “interrupts the context into which it is inserted” and “counteracts illusion.”18 By creating a conceptual or optical array that dislocates the phantasmagoria of capitalism, Benjamin hopes to displace and activate the unconscious aspects of the


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wish image, methodologically seeking to transfigure latent fantasy energies into revolutionary praxis. This arrangement is necessary because the “dream image is not yet a dialectical image, and desire is not yet knowledge.”19 Through the rescue of historical fragments that are manifest but not wholly revealed in their existing location, Benjamin wants to break the active spell of commodification and release a profane illumination, a powerful shock that grips the subject with the truth of its dreamlike state: a waking dream. The montage therefore provides Benjamin with a critical image of modern history as prehistoric, “merely natural, not yet history in the truly human sense.”20 What exists as history in the midst of the hollowed-out humanity ensnared by reification is a mere imprint of “history in the truly human sense.” A history that is truly human can be found in material remains in the process of being forgotten. Benjamin’s aim is to loosen the crystallized forms of experience that sediment in the here and now. The concept of profane illumination is one that Benjamin articulates alongside an interest in the “radical concept of freedom,” a concept introduced by Surrealism but much neglected by the Surrealists who seem content to simply abolish the distinction between the dream and history. His first inclination attends to the way in which Surrealism gives voice to this radical concept by way of images, which Benjamin sees as having the “energies of intoxication” or the fantasy energy of memory traces in the unconscious.21 With regard to this revolutionary energy, Benjamin was not so much concerned with memory as such, but with forgetting: When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.22

The revolutionary potential of the profane illumination arrives through the process of remembering how we came to forget, a process identified with an awakening out of the desirous dreamworld; Benjamin’s initial impulse was to furnish a politicized version of Sleeping Beauty. Buck-Morss summarizes Benjamin’s position: In nature, the new is mythic, because its potential is not yet realized; in consciousness, the old is mythic, because its desires never were fulfilled. Paradoxically, collective imagination mobilizes its powers for a revolutionary break from the recent past by evoking a cultural memory reservoir

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Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory of myths and utopian symbols from a more distant ur-past. . . . Utopian imagination thus cuts across the continuum of technology’s historical development as the possibility of a revolutionary rupture.23

This illumination is an instantaneous flash, wherein the old is elucidated precisely at the moment of its disappearance and sublation. The fleeting image of truth “is not a process of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation which does it justice.”24 Understood in this way, historical objects come to be situated historiographically by being blasted out of the dreamlike historical continuum: “The destructive or critical momentum of materialist historiography is registered in that blasting of historical continuity with which the historical object first constitutes itself.”25 This pyrotechnic image is “the now of recognition” and a break with the apparent and false historical continuities of unfettered progress. Benjamin holds that this shock of recognition, like a charge of electricity, is sufficient to jolt the dreaming collective into a political awakening, producing a “lightning flash” of truth and critical utopian energy. For Benjamin, this bucolic image is “dialectics at a standstill.”26 At the centre of the dialectical montage is a critique of progress, a concept that is equated with the “fetishization of modern temporality,” coincidental with the creation of myth. Through the use of constellations Benjamin thought that it would be possible to reveal the truth of modern reality, its transitoriness as well as its social and historical formation. He is thus concerned with relentlessly identifying what is new in history as belonging to the prehistoric, an eternal return of the same. This is most poignantly illustrated by trends in fashion which continually produce the zombie-like coupling of the organic with the inorganic, an indelible fabrication of “a gaily decked-out corpse.”27 As Buck-Morss indicates, Benjamin’s thought, which I am characterizing as a materialist philosophy of revelation, is situated between two poles, a place that Adorno once identified to be “bewitched,” caught between a psychological category, the wish of the collective unconscious, and a metaphysics of theological revelation.28 It might seem that neither of these poles is adequate for critical theory. However, as Buck-Morss defensively notes: The point is . . . that this utopian desire can and must be trusted as the motivation of political action (even as this action unavoidably mediates the desire)—can, because every experience of happiness or despair that was ours teaches us that the present course of events does not exhaust


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reality’s potential; and must, because revolution is understood as a Messianic break from history’s course and not its culmination.29

The concept of utopian desire is what throws the trajectory of dreamlike history off its course, introducing the possibility of a radical rupture in experience, but also a radical political rupture in terms of praxis. What Benjamin touches on, especially with his social conception of the collective unconscious and a Messianic break, is a way of thinking that counteracts the predominant Marxist idea that the base solely determines the superstructure.30 This approach must be critical, disjointed, because the reality of the dreamworld is catastrophe. Benjamin’s approach, rather than seeing everything determined by the commodity form, sees that the superstructure is also determined by multiple nonmaterial imperatives, including libidinal and symbolic “expressions,” or, to use Margaret Cohen’s Althusserian term, “overdeterminations.”31 Benjamin writes, On the doctrine of the ideological superstructure. It seems, at first sight, that Marx wanted to establish here only a casual relation between superstructure and infrastructure. But already the observation that ideologies of the superstructure reflect conditions falsely and invidiously goes beyond this. The question, in effect, is the following: if the infrastructure in a certain way (in the materials of thought and experience) determines the superstructure, but if such determination is not reducible to simple reflection, how is it then—entirely apart from any question about the originating cause—to be characterized? As its expression. The superstructure is the expression of the infrastructure. The economic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the superstructure—precisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in the contents of dreams, which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to “condition.” The collective, from the first, expressed the conditions of its life. These find their expression in the dream and their interpretation of the awakening.32

With respect to the concept of history and causality, Benjamin comes very close to articulating a critical theory of the imaginary as a vital complement to analyses that overemphasize the economy as the sole determinant of culture and downplay non-corporeal factors, such as the relation between dreams, phantasmagoria, and materiality. Benjamin’s concept of expression indicates a non-causal relation between the culture industry and its reception: neither subjectivity nor social relations are determined by their context

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alone. Benjamin’s concept of shock mitigates the realm of causality by introducing a rupture in our historical sense of time, linear time itself being the product of a particular ideological constellation. Although Adorno was highly critical of Benjamin’s trajectory at the time, it is apparent throughout his work that much of Benjamin’s position has been taken up in various ways—not only in terms of the collective unconscious, but also in terms of a shock or awakening. While Benjamin articulates a philosophy of history, and draws on the vocabulary of psychoanalysis to re-articulate the subjective encounter with prehistory as an unsettling and revolutionary encounter, Adorno emphasizes the subjective reception of artwork. Regardless of the dispute between Adorno and Benjamin over the question of the relation of art, philosophy, and the commodity form, it can be shown that they share an understanding of reception, one that fully acknowledges a prehistorical side of the subject that is formative for the ego but not subject to its cognitive mastery or reification. Reading Benjamin and Adorno together on these points proves to be highly advantageous for critical theorizing after the community turn. Elements of Benjamin’s understanding of rupture, utopian desire, and the shock of recognition can be found in much of Adorno’s thought. These concepts, I argue, provide critical theory with the groundwork for materialist understanding of revelation attuned to the theoretical elucidation of freedom from historical patterns of domination and hardened second nature. ADORNO: SHUDDER Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory are often read as a kind of interpretive lens, frequently depicted as cynical and pessimistic. Likewise, his work is often dismissively read as an aesthetic interpretation of things from the elitist viewpoint of a mandarin cultural conservatism. Such disapproval inevitably fails to take seriously anti-systemic aspects of Adorno’s project. For Adorno, the negative dialectic is not the presentation of a fixed perspective or a standpoint, nor is his aesthetic theory simply a fanciful hermeneutic prism.33 On the contrary, both stem from the immanent logic of the concept rather than, for instance, the multiple meanings of language.34 In the former, negative dialectic expresses the power of identity as the non-identical, and the way in which the non-identical is essential to the possibility of the concept. With regard to the latter, aesthetic theory is the mimetic comportment of the truth claim of art, in its critical and philosophical form. Adorno’s negative dialectic and aesthetic theory should therefore be understood not as hermeneutic strategies of interpretation, but as philosophical movements inherent


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to the concept itself, the mediated experience of the object handed over to the subject resisting its own petrifying tendencies. Crucial to Adorno’s understanding of art is the concept of “shudder.” The concept of shudder is one that appears in many of Adorno’s works, including Dialectic of Enlightenment, Negative Dialectics, and Aesthetic Theory. The concept is immanently related to his understanding of reception as well as the anticipatory utopian motif that runs throughout his work. The following will discuss Adorno’s conception of the shudder not only as it appears in his aesthetic theory, but also as it relates to intersubjectivity, the encounter with the other. In contrast to the general aim of hermeneutics, Adorno writes, “The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended.”35 The incompressibility of artwork is called the “enigma,” what is also recognized as a kind of “darkness.” For Adorno, “This darkness must be interpreted, not replaced by the clarity of meaning.”36 If, however, hermeneutics rests on the assumption that all human works have meaning, Adorno argues here for something quite different. To “interpret” darkness is not to understand artwork in a premonitory sense: “the task of a philosophy of art is not so much to explain away the element of incomprehensibility . . . but rather to understand the incomprehensibility itself.”37 What our attention is drawn to is not so much the meaning of a work of art, but the crisis of meaning produced by the irrationality or enigma of art, a crisis that is found in existing society. Taking into account the crisis of meaning (disenchantment, nihilism) includes consideration of the irrationality of the rational, the impoverishment of the subject, and the calamity of subjective experience found within the culture industry.38 This is not to say that the darkness has meaning-in-itself. Adorno’s point, rather, is that artwork conceals itself within its movement between identical and non-identical moments: “Its enigmaticalness goads it to articulate itself immanently in such a fashion that it achieves meaning by forming its emphatic absence of meaning.”39 Autonomous artwork is contradictory, a reflection of the contradictory nature of reality. According to Adorno this emphatic absence of meaning has an affective dimension; the experience of this absence is the experience of the shudder, and it is constitutive of the enigma of art, its “ridiculous” condemnation of empirical reality, ridiculous from the perspective of an Enlightenment worked up to the point of a genuine delusion.40 Adorno notes, “Artworks share with enigmas the duality of being determinate and indeterminate.”41 Art, in this sense, has a negative dimension, determined in part by the very

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absence of meaning. It is a function of montage to dissolve and affirm unity simultaneously, saying something only by not saying it.42 This paradox is at the heart of autonomous art, the autonomy of art understood as the freedom of the particular coming into contradiction with the unfreedom of the whole.43 What is paradoxical about this autonomy is the fact that its apparent freedom is simultaneously its unfreedom, and for this reason art remains critical rather than affirmative, a mimetic reflection of existing unfreedom with a utopian image of that which is not. The dialectic tendency of art, the nexus of meaning and the absence of meaning, is given semblance by the appearance of something that does not exist: the apparition.44 Since aesthetic images stand under the prohibition on graven images, the apparition is the appearance of that which cannot be said, a “heavenly vision” or mana.45 Adorno equates this apparition with Schelling’s insight into the “terror of the beginning” which he also notes may well have had its origin in the experience of art.46 Adorno observes, Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder’s own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. That shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it. Such a constitutive relation of the subject to objectivity in aesthetic comportment joins eros and knowledge.47

The concept of shudder, which is the aim of art yet impossible to achieve if striven for directly, is lodged within Adorno’s critique of society and the dialectical and anthropological framework of Dialectic of Enlightenment. The primordial experience of the shudder was originally manifest as “the cry of terror” from which mana was born, the “unspeakable dread” of the unknown.48 Myth is a product of this enigmatic encounter. In myth, the unfamiliar comes to be fixed, permanently linking horror and holiness.49 Even at this stage dialectical thinking can be detected, in the split between the animate and the inanimate, the way in which each thing “is what it is only by becoming what it is not.”50 Through the cunning of reason, which sought to abolish this tension, “the sacred essence was transferred to the sorcerers who managed it” thereby making this fixed image a sign of the


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“consolidated power of the privileged.”51 Instead of a compassionate or emphatic rationality, reason came to be associated inextricably with selfpreservation and the moment to realize philosophy was missed.52 With the Enlightenment, the reifying processes of self-preservation reached an apex with the bourgeois division of labor, culminating in the systematic enforcement of the self-alienation of individuals who must “mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul.”53 The primordial myths “fell victim to the Enlightenment,” yet are themselves its product: “Enlightenment’s mythic terror springs from a horror of myth.”54 In the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the ancient returns in the form of the modern, more systematic and catastrophic than before. It is, however, the desire to overcome reification and barbarism that survives in art.55 Artwork is the echo, the apparition, of the suffering created by the paradoxical self-destruction by way of self-preservation. The enigma of art, in contrast to the sacred, prompts the shudder not as a new form of terror but as “recollection.”56 For Adorno, art affirms the preponderance of the object by participating in the “unconscious writing of history, as anamnesis of the vanquished, of the repressed, and perhaps of what is possible.”57 Since artworks present the apparition as appearance, the flickering and vanishing shudder participates in what Adorno calls spirit: “Art’s spirit is the self-recognition of spirit itself as natural,” the eruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness.58 The shock of this recognition, which is the truth claim of artwork, provides no satisfaction for the I, but a moment in which the recipient of the shock disappears into the work, shaken: “The disappearance of the I in the moment of the shudder is not real; but delirium . . . For a few moments the I becomes aware, in real terms, of the possibility of letting self-preservation fall away.”59 Art rescues subjectivity through the negation of subjectivity. The experience of the shudder is the experience in which the petrifaction of the subject “dissolves” and the “narrowness” of self-positedness is revealed.60 The promise of art is “reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled.”61 The hardened subject is not so much shattered into fragments as it is subject to a tremble, a quake that prompts compassionate self-reflection, a gathering together of an awareness of the other without violence; it is not a further splintering of the reified consciousness. For Adorno, art mimetically participates in peacemaking, rationality without regression, even if it is not possible to sketch the form of a changed society.62 The experience of shudder in Adorno is an experience that contains a non-hermeneutic moment; it is the touch of the other in a nonviolent way. Although artwork participates in intersubjectivity, it does not do so directly.

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In this respect, art is intersubjective as apparition, the awareness of something having been said without having been said. Art comes to the rescue of intersubjectivity and undamaged life through a life that has been mutilated.63 It is in this sense that the experience of art is best understood as revelation, a nonviolent disclosure of the other. Adorno often observes “the phenomenon of fireworks is prototypical for artworks . . .” and he further maintains that artworks “appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning.”64 In some respects, Adorno’s notion that art is “a sign from heaven” should be taken as a utopian glimpse. Adorno observes, The theological heritage of art is the secularization of revelation, which defines the ideal and limit of very work. The contamination of art with revelation would amount to the unreflective repetition of its fetish character on the level of theory. The eradication of every trace of revelation from art would, however, degrade it to the undifferentiated repetition of the status quo.65

Revelation in art is part of its enigma, and the mediated response to this paradoxical appearance and vanishing is the shudder. The absolute rigidity of the work of art, what preserves its objective claim, is not to be compromised. It is both a force of disenchantment and of renewed enchantment, but of a mimetic and nonviolent kind. What Adorno and Benjamin outline here is a dialectics of revelation, irreducible to hermeneutics or a crude metaphysics. The approaches developed by Benjamin and Adorno are particularly important in light of the relation between historical and aesthetic experience and subjectivity, elements of critical theory that can be shown to be inadequately dealt with in Habermas’s communicative theory. THE ENIGMA OF INTERPRETATION, THE GRIMACE OF THE REAL66 Adorno argued that it was plausible to conceive a definition of art out of a theory of psychic life. He notes that psychoanalysis, freed from its traditional preoccupation with the hermeneutics of thematic material, may in fact be the best starting point, since psychoanalysis operates in the dialectical spirit of enlightenment.67 It is proposed here that Žižek’s Lacanian social theory provides an insightful approach further elaborating on the dynamics of reception and subjectivity in terms of the symbolic, language.


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In the debate between hermeneutics and critical theory it was shown that both Gadamer and Habermas rely on a curative-hermeneutic model of psychoanalysis. In contrast to the philosophical or methodological approaches of Gadamer and Habermas, what follows will outline a contribution more attuned to the subjective encounter with “trauma” in relation to language. Žižek argues that the traumatic object uncovered by psychoanalysis poses an enigma of interpretation, the revelation of which radically transforms the subjective relation to the symbolic field, what Lacanians call the big Other. As Žižek notes, Lacan’s early work can be seen as an unconditional espousal of hermeneutics: “All analytic experience is an experience of signification.”68 With little doubt, it is this stage in Lacan’s thought that Gadamer praises in his rejoinder to Habermas: “Psychotherapy can be described as the work of “unfolding interrupted processes of education into a complete history (which can be recounted)”—hermeneutics and the circle of language, which is closed in conversation, have their place there, as I believe I have learned above all from the work of J. Lacan.”69 Žižek argues this stage is the point in which Lacan introduces the futur antérieur of symbolization: “a fact counts not as factum brutum, but only as it is always-already historicized.”70 Here, meaning is theorized to unfold itself through the subjective encounter with others as something that is already present in a historical form, it is the establishment of a meaningful symbolic continuity between history and the present. However, he notes, by the late 1950s a shift away from hermeneutics can be detected. Žižek outlines two steps in which this transition occurs. First, he notes that Lacan’s embrace of structuralism led him to inquire into the cause of signification, “the imaginary experience-of-meaning whose inherent constituent is the misrecognition of its determining cause, the formal mechanism of the signifying structure itself.” The second step consists of Lacan’s insight into the gap that separates the symbolic from the real, and the recognition that this gap affects the symbolic order itself as its inherent limitation.71 The name that Lacan gives to this “Cause” is trauma. Žižek argues, “the Cause qua the Real intervenes where symbolic determination stumbles, misfires—that is, where a signifier falls out”—the Freudian notion of slips of the tongue for example.72 For this reason, trauma can be seen to operate indirectly, through disturbances within the symbolic order that can never be wholly traced back to an original determination. The real of trauma can be understood as the absent Cause that distorts and severs the deterministic chain of causality. The relationship between the everyday disturbance in the symbolic and the Cause is subject to a radical ambiguity: “the Cause is real, the presupposed reef which resists symbolization and disturbs the course of its automaton, yet the

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Cause is simultaneously the retroactive product of its own effects.”73 Žižek notes, “a trauma is by definition something one is not able to remember, i.e. to recollect by way of making it part of one’s symbolic narrative; as such, it repeats itself indefinitely, returning to haunt the subject—more precisely, what repeats itself is the very failure, impossibility even, to repeat / recollect the trauma properly.”74 It would be imprecise to say that trauma is the direct cause (determination) of symptoms. Rather, the Cause becomes trauma after it is woven into the symbolic, into narrative. Thus, Herein lies the trauma’s vicious cycle: the trauma is the Cause which perturbs the smooth engine of symbolization and throws it off balance; it gives rise to an indelible inconsistency in the symbolic field; but for all that, the trauma has no existence of its own prior to symbolization; it remains an anamorphic entity that gains its consistency only in retrospect, viewed from within the symbolic horizon—it acquires its consistency from the structural necessity of the inconsistency of the symbolic field.75

This paradoxical and retrospective object-cause is what Lacan calls objet petit a. The “little object” is the “subject’s shadow among the objects, a kind of stand-in for the subject, a pure semblance lacking any consistency of its own.”76 Objet petit a is encountered at the limit of symbolization and it does not pre-exist the symbolic order; rather, it merely gives body to its inherent deadlock. Objet petit a attests to the fact that “desire is never satisfied by any positive object . . . the object’s experience will always be a ‘this is not that.’”77 To put it another way, the “little object” is the self-relating negativity inherent to the big Other, the object of and cause of desire, the suture of an imaginary horizon that sustains and supports the symbolic realm giving it meaning yet not identical with it. From within the symbolic order objet a appears to be the constitutive outside, a traumatic or dislocated object that cannot be wholly integrated into the symbolic. However, if one views this object from the outside, the little object disappears altogether; it is “‘something in me more than myself ’ which cannot be reduced to any of my external symbolic determinations.”78 Žižek characterizes this paradoxical mediation as a temporal loop: objet petit a is a chimerical object of fantasy, “the object causing our desire and at the same time—this is its paradox—posed retroactively by this desire.”79 It is the “this is not that” at the centre of our identity and precisely the elusive and rugged object which motivates dissatisfaction with all existing objects. It is both the cause of desire, which operates within the realm of the symbolic,


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and the product of the symbolic itself, as the imposition of a structural lack, the splitting of the subject. In terms of hermeneutics, objet a is a traumatic object that is inaccessible to meaningful interpretation, and it remains so even after the narrativization of subjective experience. It is the indivisible remainder which cannot be assimilated. In a sense, the narrativization of trauma is taken up as the cause of a disruption, disruptions being part of the friction that constitutes familiarity and estrangement, rendered visible after the fact of an interruption. This interruption is posited from within the very field of the symbolic in a retrospective way; the cause is assumed in the present as something that has already come to pass. The real of trauma, the remainder that extends beyond the realm of the emerging symbolic identity, is that which is continually displaced through the unfolding of a meaningful life history. This can be explained in terms of Freud’s notion of dreamwork, for example, and the distinction between the latent dream-thought and the unconscious desire articulated in the dream: “In the dream-work, the latent thought is ciphered/displaced, but it is through this very displacement that the other, truly unconscious thought articulates itself.”80 Objet a is the elusive mediator of the concrete and meaningful appearance of trauma in history yet itself does not make an appearance in history as such, since it is an embodiment of a negative magnitude. Every attempt to grasp its meaning is necessarily doomed to failure since the little object is absent from the presence of the symbolic. It is, as Žižek notes, a “little piece of the Real.”81 The noticeable disruption of the real into the symbolic is therefore akin to a momentary flash; inexplicable, the interruption is absorbed into the symbolic through narrativization, the assumption of a meaningfully traumatic event bringing about the disruption in the first place. In the end, this assumption reinforces the exclusion of the Cause by situating the perturbed event in a narrative stream of ordinary causal determinations. This momentary flash is what Žižek calls the “enigma,” the point at which words fail to grasp the motor of disruption internal to the symbolic, a kind of “blind spot” that the proliferation of meaning “endeavors to cover up.”82 It is Žižek’s notion of the “enigma” that broaches the possibility of a materialist theory of revelation. Revelation, in this particular sense, is the appearance of a rupture which interrupts the flow of communication, not subject to the laws of causal determination and resisting the retroactive imposition of the fullness of meaning. It is “experience” in the sense of being a force working on language, yet this force itself cannot be assimilated into language, it remains excluded. What is revealed here is the instability and radical creativity of the relation of the subject to language, its non-identity in the midst of identity, a

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negative yet creative force that is, for Lacanians, the essence of desire. The flash of revelation is not simply an enigma, it is also an object of anxiety. The enigma brings about anxiety for the self-enclosed subject. In a striking parallel to Adorno’s understanding of the self-preserving subject in relation to art, Lacan remarks, There’s an anxiety-provoking apparition of an image which summarizes what we can call the revelation of that which is least penetrable in the real, of the real lacking any possible mediation, of the ultimate real, of the essential object which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence.83

This is why hermeneutics, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, has a tendency toward the gentrification of contradiction, the ideological attempt to absorb the enigma into social and historical fields of meaning; again, quite similar to Adorno’s conceptualization of identity and the tendency toward systematic thinking. The problem is that the identification of the appearance of an enigma as a meaningful experience is also an attempt to suture the traumatic rupture, to provide an enclosure in presence of the disruptive object. As noted in the passage above, the rupture created by a traumatic encounter provokes anxiety. Drawing on the work of Schelling, Žižek provides a definition of anxiety parallel to Lacan’s understanding: Anxiety arises when a subject experiences simultaneously the impossibility of closing itself up, of withdrawing fully into itself, and the impossibility of opening itself up, of admitting an Otherness, so that it is caught in a vicious cycle of pulsation—every attempt at creation-expansion-externalization collapses back into itself.84

The revelation of the enigma, which brings about agitation in the identity of the subject, is accompanied by anxiety that accompanies an experience of intersubjectivity as constitutive of the self. In Žižek’s thinking, the encounter with the enigma is always traumatic and is an encounter that cannot simply be integrated into experience without a remainder. The attempt to suture this breach is precisely the move toward closure; a subjective moment which creates anxiety. He goes on to note that this anxious relation “is what ‘intersubjectivity’ is actually about, not the Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’ of a multitude of academics smoking pipes at a round table and arguing about some point by means of undistorted communication.”85 In other words, part


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of every encounter with others is a real encounter; in Lacanian terms, an encounter with the jouissance of the other, the uncanny abyss of enjoyment and excitation that separates the collapse of the symbolic and the imaginary. For Lacanians, at the heart of intersubjectivity is this anxious and ideological relation, the interruption of desire, the other as a hostile and objective limit to desire. In aesthetic terms, the real of jouissance constitutive of my encounter with the other is akin to the encounter with an “ugly object,” an object that is in the wrong place. This is not to say that “the ugly” simply needs to be relocated into its proper place, but rather “an ugly object is ‘in itself ’ out of place, on account of the distorted balance between its ‘representation’ (the symbolic features we perceive) and ‘existence’—being ugly, out of place, is the excess of existence over representation.”86 The other is one who opens up the self from narcissistic self-certainty. To mediate this unsightly relation, Žižek argues that a certain degree of idealization must take place; the creation of a fantasy-frame through which to safely situate our relationships with other people. This fantasy-frame is the means through which the subject assumes a distance towards this “horror of the Real,” meaning that the reality and the proximity of the other can occur only insofar as it does not come “too close.”87 Žižek situates this claim within the context of desire, the longing of the subject for some object of satisfaction; otherwise the attribution of the real as the ugly object would make little sense. “The ugly” is precisely that part of any encounter which is anticipated to hinder the fulfillment of desire. From a Žižekian viewpoint, the idealization that Habermas identifies as the basis of communication is fantasy, a particular way of rendering the encounter with the other passive, a smoothing over of the ugly reality of an encounter with others who are perceived (falsely) to hinder desire. Habermas envisions a procedural remedy to quell the ugliness of the neighbor, seeing argumentation as a nonviolent way of resolving differences between people. The Habermasian proposal cannot but fail, however, because it is this very fantasy of an ideal speech situation that sustains the need for an enemy, the Other that requires taming.88 Hermeneutics participates in this taming of the Other, through the contextualization or historicization of the intersubjective relation; each relationship is situated in the context of a meaningful encounter. This is best understood as the gentrification of trauma, a kind of self-satisfaction achieved by means of smoothing over differences or real antagonisms: gender, class, and so on. At the dialectical moment prior to this gentrification of trauma, however, Žižek notes that an opportunity arises for an “authentic act,” the momentary suspension of the big Other which is also its simultaneous

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moment of creation. The act is strictly ethical insofar as it can be said to not give up on desire, remaining faithful to its own impossibility, it is an assumption of responsibility for all aspects of one’s existence, even though carried out in the realm of causality; but it also marks a protest against this causal network of relations. It is a transformation and a reorientation of the subject within the symbolic realm through the acknowledgement of the gap separating the symbolic from the real. From within the symbolic realm, this act will always appear out of place. Žižek notes, “Every act worthy of this name is ‘mad’ in the sense of radical unaccountability: by means of it I put at stake everything, including myself, my symbolic identity, the act is therefore always a ‘crime,’ a ‘transgression,’ namely of the limit of the symbolic community to which I belong.”89 The structure of this act is paradoxical: it is where the subject takes responsibility and simultaneously commits himself or herself to an irresponsible act, the removal of the self from the anxious web of intersubjectivity. However, this negation is the formation of a new social link, the creation of a new modality of subjectivity.90 Instead of reacting to the other with hostility, on account of the projection that the other is a hindrance to one’s own self-fulfillment, “the act” in Žižek’s thought is the means through which the social context of the encounter is transformed. ELECTIVE AFFINITIES: ŽIŽEK AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL With Benjamin, the phantasmagoria of everyday life harbors an unrealized potential. Each reified remnant of culture contains a utopian desire that, if placed in the proper constellation, solicits a shock, a historical rupture, a break with existing symbolic and cultural fields revealing the prehistorical within existing history feigning progress. This is the first step towards articulating a truly human history. Benjamin seeks to recover this profane illumination as a means of rescuing reason and the promise of unfulfilled happiness. What is interesting in Benjamin’s writings is the visible way in which he, like Žižek, struggles with the idea of causality; in particular, the causal relation between the base and the superstructure. While Benjamin does this in terms of history and political action, Žižek sets out to elucidate this point in terms of a Lacanian understanding of language and the subject of desire. Benjamin, seeking to overcome the mythic powers of fate, refers to the base-superstructure relation in terms of “expressions,” unable to establish for himself the exact relation. As he puts it, the superstructure is an “expression” of the base, which does not indicate a wholly causal relation. Benjamin also sees that nonmaterial elements, due to the nefarious processes of forgetting,


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intervene and interrupt the automatic determinism of nature, seeking to theoretically depart from both the mechanistic causality of science and the dialectical causality of the Marxists. Benjamin’s choice of psychoanalysis could not have been more appropriate. What Benjamin articulates in terms of a philosophy of history is parallel to the Lacanian thesis that “Marx invented the symptom.” In particular, Benjamin’s notion of “expression” can be placed aside Lacan’s notion of surplus, the enjoyment of the excess produced by the ideological field. Žižek notes, the secret desire of the form of the dream and the form of the commodity is not its content but the form itself: It is this unconscious/sexual desire which cannot be reduced to a ‘normal train of thought’ because it is, from the very beginning, constitutively repressed (Freud’s Urverdrangung)—because it has no ‘original’ in the ‘normal’ language of everyday communication, in the syntax of the conscious/preconscious; its only place is in the mechanisms of the ‘primary process.’ This is why we should not reduce the interpretation of dreams, or symptoms in general, to the retranslation of the ‘latent dream-thought’ into the ‘normal,’ everyday common language of intersubjective communication (Habermas’s formula). The structure is always triple; there are always three elements at work: the manifest dream-text, the latent dream-content or thought and the unconscious desire articulated in a dream.91

For Žižek, the Lacanian thesis that Marx invented the symptom means that Marx detected a fissure or asymmetry belying the universalism of the bourgeois rights and duties, an exception to the rule. This imbalance functions as a constitutive moment: The ‘symptom’ is, strictly speaking, a particular element which subverts its own universal foundation, a species subverting its own genus. In this sense, we can say that the elementary Marxian procedure of ‘criticism of ideology’ is already ‘symptomatic.’ It consists in detecting a point of breakdown heterogenous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its closure, its accomplished form.92

Žižek provides the example of the freedom to sell one’s labor: when the worker sells their labor freely, they also lose their freedom. What this means is that ideology is not on the side of knowing, but rather, on the side of reality, the interpreted horizon of intersubjectivity, a thesis found in Benjamin’s work as well. In this, the symbolic symptom the paradox of freedom

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is located on the side of reality making an appearance through the subjective encounter with the limits of the symbolic. In analogy to the way in which Benjamin locates a split between the base and superstructure, Žižek locates a split between the real and the symbolic. This parallel can also be seen in Benjamin’s distinction between history (dreamworld) and authentic history as profane illumination, the rupture of the phantasmagoria through the shock of recognition. Just as the loss entailed by forgetting which Benjamin identifies coincides, in Lacanian terms, with the emergence of hermeneutic eclipse of the little object, the shock that releases revolutionary energies can be likened to what Žižek calls “the act,” emerging out of the appearance of the enigma, a disclosure of the real in the symbolic realm. Adorno’s concept of the shudder is quite similar to Benjamin’s understanding of shock. However, Adorno discusses the shudder in relation to the experience of artworks, seeing little if any potential for liberation emerging from the culture industry or its products. Although he develops this concept most succinctly in his Aesthetic Theory, the concept of shudder has profound political implications as well. Martin Morris argues that Adorno’s underlying point is that the medium of communication has an “aesthetic comportment that is repressed by the reification of language” and that “any notion of communicative rationality adequate to its concept must be a rationality that acknowledges its aesthetic dimension, its corporeal medium and reference.”93 The shudder, then, is the mimetic receptivity of the other, a receptivity that does not “annex the alien” but lets it remain “distant and different in its lasting nearness.”94 In this respect, the concept of the shudder, as an experience of the non-identical, might apply to all forms of reception and not simply to works of art. The problem that Adorno was attempting to deal with was the very problem of the autonomy of art, the way in which art had become severed from everyday experience. When Adorno’s notion of shudder is placed alongside Benjamin’s notion of shock, it becomes apparent that montage is not simply an aesthetic category, but a historical and political category as well. This is the link that many critics of Adorno, Habermas included, neglect. Art is a model of reconciliation in Adorno’s thought, but not a definition of reconciliation. If it is acknowledged that the shudder has a political aspect, the aesthetic comportment that is the corporeality of communication and receptivity, in whatever form this may take, it becomes apparent that the shudder is not limited to art but also underlies the structure of intersubjectivity; the shudder anticipates through recollection a nonviolent encounter with the other. In a more general sense, Morris argues that the shudder could be said to be an essential part of any democratic politics, a vital aspect of any possible


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openness to difference.95 Thus, Adorno’s notion of the shudder meets up with Benjamin’s understanding of profane illumination, the explosive revelation of the dialectical image or object. Žižek also discusses intersubjective relations along the lines of a mediated subject-object relation. What is identified as the shudder or the shock of recognition has a parallel with the Lacanian notion of the encounter with the enigma of the Other, the irreducible aspect of the encounter which cannot be determined or exhausted solely by symbolic means. Each encounter with others is a real encounter.96 What is described in Dialectic of Enlightenment as a violent reaction to the other experienced as a cry of terror mediated by identity thinking, is also described by Adorno as having the potential to produce a shudder, the preponderance of the object, an encounter with the other in a nonviolent way, an encounter with the remains of life amidst the absence of total coercive determination, the convulsion of the subject under the duress of identity thinking, the momentary flash of the non-identical. Following Benjamin, this strange encounter has to do with the utopian wish submerged by layers of phantasmagoria, a rekindling of criticism impelling a desire to engage in revolutionary praxis against the tide of false progress. What each of these three models of intersubjectivity agrees upon is the notion that our relations are determined not only by the symbolic, but by other non-corporeal factors as well: phantasmagoria, apparition, the big Other. Each subject has their own particular “imaginary” that situates their experience, speaking, and self-understanding. This imaginary, the noncorporeal aspect of language, is a force that works on language is also the mediating vessel of language as well. This relation between language and the imaginary is precisely what is missing in Habermas’s account. INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND THE ANTINOMIES OF REVELATION Without passing over the difficulties of the transition from a philosophy of consciousness to a philosophy of intersubjectivity, it should be noted that intersubjectivity is not simply about the face to face encounter between two subjects. There are decisively non-linguistic or imaginary factors, fantasy frames, that mediate interactions between subjects. I have suggested that two different mediations can be envisioned: subject-object or subjectimage and subject-subject. I have attempted to capture the complexity of these relations and the difficulty of theorizing them in three spheres: history, art, and language. The following will explore some of the possible implications of a materialist theory of revelation for Habermas’s critical social theory.

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As illustrated above, Adorno and Benjamin struggle to articulate the way in which the self-preserving ego, an ego taking up an instrumental attitude toward itself, encounters a disruptive shock of recognition. This shock is a revelation in the sense that it displaces the subject in an instrumental relation to itself by means of a mimetic recognition of the prehistoric past that is covered over. This is a past that is part of the reified history of the subject which I would equate with the imaginary substratum, and thus cannot be understood as “history proper.” Žižek, drawing on Lacan, articulates a similar moment with his notion of the “grimace of the Real,” a heterogeneous encounter that “traumatizes” the tendency toward a self-enclosed ego.97 What distinguishes these three approaches from Habermas’s approach is their emphatic understanding of rupture and recognition and the way in which such contradictions create fissures and fragmentations of the imaginary within the subject, fractures that sunder the subject’s impulse to become self-identical and perfectly self-fathoming. To be sure, it is not Habermas’s position that the subject within society can be wholly transparent to itself or others. However, the moment of revelation that I have highlighted in Benjamin, Adorno, and Žižek’s work reveals a volatile truth to the subject that cannot be readily accommodated by Gadamer’s hermeneutics or Habermas’s depth hermeneutics, both of which lean toward the absorption of enigma or darkness rather a mimetic self-distancing or decentering. With regard to hermeneutics, critical or not, interpretive inquiry can be said to plunge itself into estranged elements of the subject that are opened up by enigmatic encounters; but, hermeneutics arrives too late, and too compulsively, working endlessly to instrumentally situate experience within a meaningful framework. Enigmas are explained away rather than comprehended in their internally constituting and essential undeterminability. In other words, hermeneutics and critical hermeneutics work toward the closure of the subject, the suturing and maintenance of boundaries even when such apertures are non-threatening.98 With this in mind, a problem can now be detected in Habermas’s understanding of the symmetry between public communication and the process of repression. For Habermas, the process of the excommunication of language from public communicability into the unconscious, and the therapeutic return of petrified symbols, stands in a proportioned relationship. The path from public communication (normalcy) to private distortions is conceived of as a fluid exchange. By tracing distortions through symptoms the discrepancies can be systematically reversed. Following the argument here, the profane illumination, the mimetic shudder, or the grimace of the real constitute disruptions taking place within language. The return of privatized


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language is thus not an equal exchange but must be read along the lines of the creative reinterpretation of one’s life history and self-understanding. This is where Bernstein’s analysis of Habermas is helpful. The narrative re-telling of one’s life history is a hermeneutic project but the dynamic which prompts such productive transfigurations is what I have termed revelation. Bernstein contends that Habermas’s depth hermeneutics is not a critical science but a critical hermeneutics, one charting the trajectory of the reorientation of the subject along narrative lines, avoiding the problem of equating the truth of a particular narrative with the truth of a structure of development. Due to the nature of this split, the subject is only able to stabilize the fragmented world of the symbolic through the creation of a coherent narrative plot bound together by nodal points of meaning. This narrative self-understanding is a meaningful story that holds together the “night of the world” (to borrow a Žižekian-Hegelian theme). This constitutes what I think we can call a fantasy frame, the unavoidably unique way in which the subject negotiates reality through a kind of fictive narrative.99 The term fictive here is used to describe the narrative form of self-identity, the way in which an identity takes on a story-like quality of narration. In contrast, Habermas altogether neglects the advent of this fantasy frame and the anxiety accompanying its tendency toward hermeneutic enclosure. For Habermas, the coherency of the subject is maintained solely on a public language that is constitutive for all subjects: intersubjectivity, as the shared realm of language, is the basis of the individual. In this view, the unconscious is simply a derivative or malformation of the public nature of language-use. Since subjects are (presumably) socialized within identical linguistic structures, Habermas argues that this background constitutes the objective conditions for cognitive development. Public language, in other words, is what binds subjects together. The problem is that the conception of language as part of the public domain has a tendency to exclude from consideration the unique way in which individuals create their own identities in tension with publicly accepted norms and stereotypes, whether in the form of counter-cultures, sub-cultures, or other social variations of the norm. The notion that individuality is little more than a privatization of public discourses is highly problematic, virtually identifying any unique form of subjectivity, or even minority counter-cultures, with pathology. Habermas’s polemics against aestheticism in postmodernism, mysticism in environmentalism, decisionism in praxis philosophy, and particularism in feminism serve as examples of this tendency toward pathologization.100 It becomes apparent through a theory of revelation that the emergence of ruptures within experience are contiguous with speech, and that through

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such interruptions the subject is separated from the illusion of being selfidentical. What Adorno calls the shudder, and Benjamin the shock of recognition, is the revealed reminder of the subject’s non-identity with itself as well as being a non-violent experience of the other. Such encounters are “traumatic” only in the sense that they transform the relation of the petrified subject to itself via the aesthetic-historical-symbolic field. I argue that the experience of revelation, the encounter with the other, is precisely what makes intersubjectivity possible. Ultimately, what Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality fails to adequately register is the enigmatic aspect of our encounters with others. Habermas is aware that the intersubjective encounter is disruptive, yet he does not thematically pursue this. He writes, for instance: If by way of a thought experiment we compress the adolescent phase of growth into a single critical instant . . . [the adolescent] must, on penalty of utter disorientation, reconstruct, at the level of basic concepts, the normative orders that his hypothetical gaze has destroyed by removing the veil of illusions from them. Using the rubble of devalued traditions . . . he erects a new normative structure that must be solid enough to withstand critical inspection by someone who will henceforth distinguish soberly between socially accepted norms and valid norms.101

Habermas further argues that after the “destruction” of traditional forms of identity, “all that remains is a procedure for rationally motivated choice.” This is then likened to an “unnaturalness” which is an “echo of the developmental catastrophe that historically once devalued the world of traditions and thereby provoked efforts to rebuild at a higher level.”102 What Habermas does not adequately discuss, and perhaps even bars from consideration, is the hermeneutic tendency toward self-enclosure that registers such experiences of “catastrophe” and “destruction” which are then perceived to force the subject into the realm of “rationally motivated choice.” What Habermas misses is the narrative way in which subjects re-constitute themselves by means of narrating the past in terms of catastrophe, destruction, and rationally motivated choice. Such events are narrative constructions brought on by a hermeneutic reconstruction of identity. Habermas’s conception of working-through the leveling of perspective amounts to the reconciliation of the shattered past and the hoped for future by means of the guarantees provided by the anticipation of “rationally motivated agreement,” even if this agreement is not actually forthcoming. The anticipation of agreement securing the identity of the proverbial adolescent is the work of a particular fantasy formation. It is


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not the only narrative that could be told, nor the only expectation that can be projected. What Habermas relieves himself of having to explain is the multiple ways in which the experience of communication can be affected by the encounter with conflicting behavioral expectations. In this way, Habermas’s conception of this erection of a new normative structure as a meaningful reworking of the destruction of past identity through the adoption of a new more reflexive identity should be viewed as having an enigma as its core. Such an event, however prototypical, should not be viewed as an experience of pure rationality, the experience of communicative morality sui generis, but a transformation that lifts the subject out one fantasy frame into another, not the elevation of the subject out of nature altogether. Žižek’s version of a similar prototypical event is noticeably different: At the very moment when, according to the official ideology, we are finally leaving behind the ‘immature’ political passions (the regime of the ‘political’: class struggle and other ‘outdated’ divisive antagonisms) for the postideological pragmatic universe of rational administration and negotiated consensus, for the universe, free of utopian impulses, in which the dispassionate administration of social affairs goes hand in hand with aestheticized hedonism (the pluralism of ‘ways of life’)—at this very moment, the foreclosed political is celebrating a triumphant comeback in its most archaic form of pure, undistilled racist hatred of the Other that renders the rational, tolerant attitude utterly impotent.103

At the very moment when it would seem that a post-traditional viewpoint is in order, as Habermas indicates, there are also examples (counterexamples in this case) of an outburst of intolerance, a refusal to re-negotiate reality in a purely procedural way. A procedure, in other words, may in fact be just, but it may be a bitter justice, potentially leading to anger and frustration. What Habermas describes is not so much the advent of a mature rationality but the collapse of the subjective field through a particular rupture or disruption brought about by the encounter with difference.104 As indicated, this encounter is enigmatic, and can be reworked through the creation of a new narrative self-understanding or reacted against in terms of anxiety and violence. I would posit that whether or not such encounters lead to anxiety and frustration or self-reflection hinges on whether such ruptures are re-absorbed by the subject through hermeneutic closure (creating anxiety) or hermeneutic opening (recognition of the enigma) and dialectical tension between the familiar and the strange.105

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According to my view, what Habermas fails to account for in this disruptive process is the need for the subject to renew their relation to the symbolic after such interruptions have taking place. Until the subject creates a new set of meaningful relations there will be difficulties in maintaining intersubjective relations, but this process does not coincide with the establishment of an undistorted relation to public language-use. Without the reestablishment of a fantasy frame, unique to the subject and her or his particular interests, the fragmented units of language will be meaningless. Again, Habermas’s theory of argumentation is theorized “as if ” relations are purely linguistic, without a hint of being grounded by an imaginary positing. This is the myth of pure cognition, absolute self-transparency; as Agnes Heller notes, a subject with “no body, no feelings.”106 In effect, it is a conception of the subject without a situation, without a reality. What I am calling revelation here refers to the rupture of embodied experience that forestalls the complete self-disclosure of the subject and its utter (and ultimately nihilistic) self-identification identified by Horkheimer and Adorno. In Habermas’s understanding of communicative reason, language is read through a pragmatic lens. The speaking subject, in this reading, takes up, on account of her or his linguistic competencies, a threefold relationship to the world: an objectivating perspective, a social or intersubjective perspective, and a private or subjective perspective. Habermas refers to each of these world-defining orientations as spheres. For Habermas, the collapse of the distinction between any of these spheres is regressive. The concept of revelation presented here introduces the way in which the relationship between and within these spheres is transformed or transfigured. Rather than assuming that these spheres are pre-established for the last time, a theory of revelation incorporates the possibility of their radical transformation. Revelation is the moment in which the very paradigm of communication undergoes a transfiguration, a profound reorienting of what counts as normality. Public communication only appears normal by passing through the gentrification of contradiction, hermeneutic enclosure passing over the heterogeneous by means of exclusion. What Adorno identifies as the “touch of the other” may also be understood as an encounter with the paradox of the “enigma,” a “message” or “revelation” The turn toward rational procedures is one possible outcome, but not the only possible outcome. When Marcuse speculated about the transformation of the senses, “the new sensibility,” he was pointing to the way in which our everyday relationships could be different than they are, where even something as banal as walking down the street would not be experienced as it typically is today (under the duress of the clock, for instance). This kind of speculative transformation


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of the senses entails precisely the kind of intervention that has been elaborated here, an enigmatic proximity and distance within existing relationships. While I have argued that such revelation is non-violent, it is also a genuine shock. Benjamin’s comments about the intoxicating energy of revolutionary praxis, Adorno’s emphatic understanding of the role of cruelty in art, and Žižek’s discussion about the “fire and sword” of belief speak to this point. Following my argument here, communicative freedom cannot be conceived of as the capacity to freely articulate linguistic utterances without distortion, to freely be able to translate between pre-political distinctions between public and private validity claims. Communicative freedom is reified when reduced to linguistic expressions. Drawing on Benjamin, Adorno, and Žižek it has been argued that a more materialistic or sensuous understanding of communication is necessary. Revelation, as it has been defined here, is an enigmatic encounter with the other, a shock of the recognition of difference. By using the term revelation I am deliberating articulating a break with the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the depth hermeneutics of Habermas. While theological revelation is a concept that traditionally refers to the outbreak of eternity within finite relationships, it perhaps understood in a comparatively secular way as an enigma that does not follow from the causal-determinations produced by instrumental reason. The concept here does not therefore refer to a theological intervention. On the contrary, it articulates the way in which the entire frame of the symbolic is shifted and transformed, renegotiated. Instead of conceiving communicative freedom along Habermasian lines, as the capacity of the subject to radically decontextualize the way in which they use language, it is proposed here that intersubjectivity be viewed along the lines of a struggle for recognition betwixt historicity and anticipated futurity. A theory of recognition takes into account the paradox of differentiation and communicative breakdown and the revelatory moment that accompanies the reformation of subjective orientations. Such a theory is also more sensitive the imaginary aspects of intersubjectivity than Habermas’s over-determined linguistic approach.

Chapter Five

The Struggle for Recognition: Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Jessica Benjamin

Habermas’s mature work argues that the most promising attempt to grasp the significance of social individualization is to be found in the work of George Herbert Mead. According to Habermas, Mead’s social psychology takes up the program of the philosophy of consciousness under naturalistic presuppositions and, in doing so, develops a materialist solution to problems concerning the self-reflexive access to consciousness and the genesis of selfconsciousness.1 Habermas’s reading of Mead, found most succinctly in his essay “Individuation through Socialization” (1988), modifies his early discussion of Hegel’s dialectic of labor and interaction (1968) in light of the ongoing developments in his critical social theory.2 Although the basic aim of his analysis remains the same in both essays, his later argument is a more nuanced account with a richly developed array of psychological and sociological concepts absent in his earlier interactive reading of Hegel. Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition (1992) is a sympathetic extension of Habermas’s work.3 The first section on Hegel and the second section on Mead, the two parts comprising the first half of the study, share an almost identical formulation of basic concepts and express a similar view regarding the articulation of a theory of individuation and socialization with a normative basis. Honneth’s work, building on that of Habermas, highlights the importance of recognition as constituting the ineluctable moral grammar of social conflicts. His innovation is to use the thought of Mead as a materialist reformulation of Hegel’s theory of the struggle for recognition, now theorized as the core of a communicative ethics. He argues that through the concepts of love, rights, and solidarity, processes of social change can be 147

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explained in reference to normative demands structurally internal to relationships of mutual recognition.4 Throughout the previous chapters I advanced claims that Habermas’s critical theory is prone to a series of problems internal to his theoretical aims. In Benhabib’s phrasing, Habermas’s twin aims include the development of an explanatory-diagnostic of modern society in terms of health and pathology and an anticipatory-utopian critique.5 These problems find an accumulated difficulty here, in Habermas’s understanding of individuation, socialization, and the experiential relation of the self to others. In my second chapter I argued that Habermas, despite the requirement of naturalistic premises, is unable to adequately theorize relations between internal and external nature. I suggested that this is most poignantly felt in his eclipse of the non-linguistic substratum of the psyche, the imaginary, but also has implications concerning the subjective capacity to externalize interior representations. This also illuminates problems with Habermas’s understanding of the internalization of encounters with others and the entwinement of the imaginary and reality. The point of my critique is that Habermasian analysis inadvertently and persistently neglects the significance of fantasy and the imaginary as having prominent roles in intra- and intersubjective life and because of this ends up promoting an emphatic rather than self-reflective understanding of moral reasoning. This aporia appears to be a generic problem with the overall shape and accent of communicativetheoretical frameworks seeking to explicate the normative basis of social criticism in an exclusively linguistic fashion. I am not suggesting a resolution to these problems. Here, I’m simply trying to account for the dilemma. While Honneth’s attempt to more thoroughly base a communicative ethics on a theory of recognition does mitigate this hiatus in Habermas’s work, it is my contention that his work remains too closely tied to that of Habermas to adequately account for the paradoxes of communication and rationality that are revealed by a careful analysis of the intersubjectivity of psychic life. In particular, Habermas neglects the contradictory will to power constitutive of the assertion of identity along with the capacity of the subject to internalize its encounters with external reality and imaginatively identify with others. Of the numerous issues that could be raised here I have decided to focus on moments of social interaction that Habermas deems to be pathological from within the viewpoint of “the moral imaginary of discourse ethics.”6 I agree with Jessica Benjamin: given the entwinement of communication and fantasy, it is unreasonable to equate deadlocks in communication with pathology. In contrast to Habermas, Benjamin does not theorize the delicate and often contradictory movements in psychic life in a hierarchy of stages

The Struggle for Recognition

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that banish all undesirable or conflicting elements as pathological, nor does her framework require the complete and unmediated reversibility of excommunicated symbols. Benjamin observes that intersubjective theory explores the development of mutual recognition without associating assertion or the refusal to cooperate with a moral or ethical violation and, at the same time, provides critical insights regarding the entwinement of ideology and enlightenment and the seductions of domination.7 Contrary to Habermas and Honneth, Benjamin’s intersubjective theory does not require a normative ideal of balance in communication that “equates breakdown with failure and the accompanying phenomena—internalization, fantasy, aggression—with pathology.”8 A theory that does so inevitably ends up being arbitrarily exclusive and falls short of its internal commitment to emancipatory criticism. Furthermore, Benjamin argues, such a theory is prone to being insensitive to structures of gender and sexual difference. In what follows I provide an outline of Habermas’s and Honneth’s work and a critique drawing on the psychoanalytic thought of Jessica Benjamin. It is my aim to demonstrate that the Habermasian emphasis on the pragmatics of language anticipating undistorted communication cannot fully account for or theoretically apprehend the range of progressive and regressive intersubjective relations possible. Benjamin’s analysis provides a persuasive rejoinder to Habermas’s and Honneth’s communicative theoretical argument because her critical insights into the relation between domination and submission in the intimate sphere also relate to relations of domination and submission in society as a whole in a way that cannot be thematized consistently by a communicative theoretical approach. In failing to elaborate intersubjectivity along such lines Habermas’s and Honneth’s critical theories become blind to the paradoxical social energy of desire as well as the way in which fantasy comes to be entangled with gendered and gendering social structures and institutions. JÜRGEN HABERMAS: INDIVIDUATION AND SOCIALIZATION According to Habermas, Mead made the connection between role-taking, the formation of conscience, and gains in autonomy by individuals who are socialized in increasingly differentiated conditions. Through processes of socialization, Habermas maintains the emerging subject comes to encounter a variety of contradictory behavioral expectations. These divergent expectations introduce the subject into the demands of problem solving as a means of achieving success in their own aims as well as coordinating their activities in alignment with others. Habermas observes that to the extent that

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this occurs “there arises an internal center for the self-steering of individually accountable conduct.”9 This center is the locus of self-determination and self-realization, a self-reflecting agency that is freely able to adopt both first and second person perspectives within the context of coordinating actions with others. The emergence of this center for self-steering is also coincidental with disruptions in the communicative coordination of action or in instrumental means-to-ends activity. As Habermas notes, when the “tried-and-true” expectations of the individual disintegrate the previously unquestioned world of objects becomes radically decentered and their objective position is thrown back into the subjective world.10 When the certainty of the lifeworld is shattered or drawn into a shadow of doubt, the subject is afforded an opportunity to reassess their normative and cognitive expectations. This prompts the actor to become conscious of her or his subjectivity in two ways. First, the subject comes to realize that the false world of objects henceforth relied upon as a means of calculating and predicting events is a subjective world. Second, the individual must find a new way of dealing with this conflicted reality: the subject “must form better hypotheses through abduction out of the rubble of the invalidated representations” and “reconstruct a collapsed interpretation of the situation.”11 While at first there is a purely egoistic reason for doing so, due to the improved possibility of success in achieving sought after aims, Habermas notes that this dislocation also brings the subject into an as of yet explored relation with oneself: self-consciousness. For Habermas, the internalized processing of conflicts is determined by the extent to which an individual must first posit itself as a spontaneously acting subject. This gesture of self-positing is thought to lead toward the gradual autonomy or autonomization of the self.12 Habermas argues that this process is not so much the singularization of the self, the positing of a monistic and isolated self, as it is a process of individuation, the self-realization of the individual. Individualization is achieved through socialization, whereas singularization, Habermas argues, is the product of reifying systemic forces. Whereas the achievement of individualization emerges through the realization of the self within a community of others, singularization is an effect of social integration, as a consumer or laborer for instance, without political inclusion.13 Habermas, drawing on Mead, demonstrates how the process of individualization takes place through the linguistically mediated process of socialization and simultaneously constitutes an individual life-history. He further maintains that we can detect from the structure of language how it is that subjectivity finds a way to itself only on a detour through externalization in


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other things and in other human beings.14 If, Habermas remarks, subjectivity is conceived of as the inward space of one’s own representations then everything subjective will be accessible only in the form of objects of self-observation, the subject will have access to itself only as an objectified “me.”15 Until the actor comes upon her- or himself as a social object in communicative action, oriented by an I-you relationship, self-consciousness is impossible. Through this practical self-relation there arises a “me” that is not subject to the objectivist fallacy. The “me” that Habermas discusses is the refracted self as viewed from the first person “I.” The “me” is accessible as the exact memory of a spontaneous state of the “I” read from the reaction of the second person viewpoint.16 The “me” is the experience of the self in memory mediated by the recognition of another. Habermas understands the idea of “recognizing-oneself-in-the-other” as the means through which the basic form of self-relation is made possible, the accomplishments of the self with an other in interaction.17 Habermas, in agreement with Mead, connects this relation to self as a transition to an evolutionary new stage of communication, wherein the actor conceives of her- or himself as a participant in interaction and thus becomes visible to her- or himself as a social object. The actor is in effect “doubled” in the instance of a “me” following performatively from the “I” as “a shadow.”18 This marks self-consciousness not as a phenomenon inherent in the subject but as communicatively generated.19 Through the medium of language, Habermas maintains that self-referential cognition allows one to monitor and control one’s own behavior. Since the sedimentation of the “me” is constituted by institutional and familiar regulations, for example, the encounter with differentiated behavioral expectations leading to frustration and disruption prompts the subject into an interactive field. Until this point the traditions and regulations constituting the self are unproblematic. Now that such expectations are splintered, the void created can be filled by normatively generalized behavioral expectations taking the place of the devalued traditions. This situation extends self-relation into the sphere of role-taking, the capacity to see the world from the viewpoint of an alter. Habermas emphasizes that these expectations are normative, not cognitive: Through the fact that I perceive myself as the social object of an other, a new reflexive agency is formed through which ego makes the behavioral expectations of others into his own. To the normative character of these expectations, however, there corresponds a transmuted structure of this second “me” as well as a different function of the self-relation. The “me” of the practical relation-to-self is no longer the seat of an originary or

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Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory reflected self-consciousness but an agency of self-control. Self-reflection here takes on the specific tasks of mobilizing motives for action and of internally controlling one’s own modes of behavior.20

The “me” in this instance is mitigated by the “generalized other,” the collective representations of a specific community. This is why Habermas characterizes the “me” as a conservative force, since this agency is closely united with what already exists.21 Furthermore, the practical relation-to-self does not want to recognize itself; rather, “it wants to reassure itself about itself as the initiator of an action that is attributable solely to it.”22 Looking for reassurance, the “me” becomes the power of a particular collective over an individual will, characterized by an identity formation derived from blind subjugation to external social controls. At this stage the individual is locked into a conventional ego-identity. It is not until the realization of the difference between self-determination and self-realization that the individual can begin to see their identity as formed by conflicting role expectations thus disintegrating the basis of such conventions and liberating the ego from its conservative viewpoint. Habermas argues that the transition to postconventional morality is unavoidable insofar as individualization is plagued by conflicting demands which apply pressure on the individual to recognize a plurality of worldviews. The gradual awareness of these conflicts throws the actor into a wider commonwealth of interaction through the anticipation of an unlimited communication community, wherein the claim to uniqueness and irreplaceability can be recognized by moral agents.23 Habermas thus argues that the ego finds itself by way of others through the counterfactually supposed assumption of universal discourse: “a postconventional ego-identity can only stabilize itself in the anticipation of symmetrical relations of unforced reciprocal recognition.”24 Under the conditions of a postconventional identity, the subject reverses the relationship between the “I” and the “me” wherein the “me” is transformed from being a backdrop of normative and epistemic expectations to being part of the lived encounter with others. The “I” takes on a performative attitude by entering into interpersonal relations with other people. Although the first and second person perspectives are exchangeable, the second person perspective is taken up from the first person, as author of identity claims aiming at intersubjective recognition.25 AXEL HONNETH: STRUGGLES FOR RECOGNITION To the extent that there is a point of departure from Habermas’s theoretical framework, Honneth’s work could be said to be a slight anthropologically


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informed modification of Habermas’s understanding of cognitive development and social evolution. Honneth’s work also has the advantage of addressing Habermas’s bifurcated moral theory of discourse, which makes a razor sharp distinction between justice and the good life, in a more integrated manner. Indeed, Honneth argues that Habermas must “implicitly ignore all those potentialities for moral action which may not have reached the level of elaborated value judgments, but which are nonetheless persistently embodied in culturally coded acts of collective protest or even in mere silent moral disapproval (Max Weber).”26 Drawing on similar resources, Honneth seeks to establish the normative ideal suggested in Habermas’s critical theory in a more textured way, arguing that recognition is not simply abstract justice but also self-realization, the “settled ethos of a particular life world.”27 Because Honneth sees intersubjective recognition of humanity as a moral act, the reality of recognition implies evolution to a higher stage of ethical relations. Instead of seeing justice and questions concerning the good life as separate, Honneth seems them as ineliminably related. Thus for Honneth “there is a categorical imperative for recognition.”28 Once this moral imperative has been realized, ethical life is not only made possible but also flourishes. Following Hegel’s Jena writings and a Habermasian reading of Mead, Honneth sets out to chart three patterns of intersubjective recognition: love, rights, and solidarity, linking the morally motivated struggles of social groups with their collective attempt to establish and expand institutional and cultural forms of reciprocal recognition. Seeing recognition as an imperative, Honneth argues that the anthropological need for reciprocity, illuminated through social psychology, provides a normative pressure that compels individuals “to remove constraints on the meaning of mutual recognition” as a means of expanding their claims of subjectivity. This ever increasing pressure toward recognition, apart from familiar relations, entails the realization of the “generalized other” in two distinct areas: legal relations and the sphere of work.29 Honneth’s overall analysis attempts to link three patterns of relationships that can be categorically distinguished with regard to a) the medium of recognition, b) the form of the relation-to-self made possible, c) the potential for moral development.30 Without using “love” in the restricted sense of intimate sexual relationships, Honneth defines love relations as referring to primary relationships: friendships, parent-child relationships, as well as erotic relationships between lovers. A love relation is any relation constituted by a strong emotional attachment among a limited but closely knit number of people.31 Using a phrase from Hegel, Honneth remarks that love can be understood as “being oneself in another.”32 Love “represents the first stage of reciprocal recognition, because

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in it subjects mutually confirm each other with regard to the concrete nature of their needs and thereby recognize each other as needy creatures.”33 It is thus in the intimate sphere that mutual recognition first appears as an imperative for moral and cognitive development. In order to provide empirical evidence of the significance of love relations, Honneth surveys recent developments in psychoanalytic thought. Drawing primarily on psychoanalytic object-relations theory, he observes that there is evidence pointing to the lasting significance of prelinguistic interactive experiences constituted by balances of independence and attachment.34 This insight marks an advance in Habermas’s approach which remains particularly resistant to prelinguistic phenomenon. In particular, Honneth cites the work of Donald Winnicott as well as that of Jessica Benjamin as fruitfully developing a psychoanalytic interpretation of the love relationship as a process of mutual recognition.35 Supported by the therapeutic side of psychoanalysis, Honneth observes that patients suffering from mental illness can often trace back such disturbances to the breakdown of bonds between children and significant others, arguing that the intersubjectivist extension of the psychoanalytic framework can “convincingly portray love as a particular form of recognition . . . owing to the specific way in which it makes the success of affectional bonds dependent on the capacity, acquired in early childhood, to strike a balance between symbiosis and self-assertion.”36 Keeping such studies in mind, Honneth interjects that “the shift of focus to that part of one’s own self that Mead called the ‘I’ thus presupposes that one trusts the loved person to maintain his or her affection, even when one’s own attention is withdrawn.”37 Without the capacity to “be alone,” which expresses a practical form of the relation-to-self, “mature confidence” cannot develop and with this, the security of basic self-assertion. Honneth sees self-confidence as the necessary basis for the development of an individual sense of self. The capacity of an intersubjective theory to derive criterion for what counts as a disorder or pathology with regard to affectional bonds, such as unsuccessful reciprocity or the denial of recognition, demonstrates for Honneth the empirical appropriateness of a concept of love conceived in terms of a theory of recognition.38 He argues that the theory of recognition makes it possible to grasp failures of recognition in systematic terms, as one-sidedness in the direction of one of the two poles (ego-relatedness and boundary dissolution) of the balance of recognition. Masochism and sadism are examples of such failures.39 In sum, Honneth argues that love is a sphere of relations in which the other’s individual independence is recognized as well as an individual sense of affective confidence in the continuity of shared concern.40


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In agreement with Hegel, Honneth thus argues that love is the structural core of all ethical life, even if it retains an element of “moral particularism.”41 Without this core as the basis for self-confidence autonomous participation in public life is unimaginable. Nevertheless, it is only in the instance of legal relations that the particularism of love and care is transcended, with the extension of the moral core of loving relations to a wider community, the imagined perspective of the Meadian “generalized other.” Honneth is quick to note that the only relation between the sphere of love and the sphere of legal recognition is their shared logic of reciprocal recognition. While confirming the dynamics of loving relations through object-relations theory, he turns to a conceptual and historical analysis of modern law to highlight the significance of recognition in this domain. Beginning his discussion by noting that Mead’s concept of legal recognition is unnecessarily limited to concerns of rights and duties, and is thus bound to a conventional system of law, Honneth argues that reciprocity found in legal recognition can only be developed coherently if the distinction between tradition-bound and post-traditional law is made. He does this by means of distinguishing the concept of rights from the concept of esteem, indicating that such a separation can be elaborated historically. Honneth notes, “as long as an individual’s legitimate claims are not yet infused with the universalistic principles of post-conventional morality, they amount to nothing more than the authority accorded to that individual as a member of a particular concrete community.”42 Following Hegel, he argues that a definition of a legal person can only take shape in light of the premises of a universalist conception of morality: the separation of questions of justification, having to do with rational agreement about disputed norms, from those of application, dealing with particular evaluations. Thus, legal rights belong to the domain of institutionally guaranteed mutual reciprocity derived from discourses regarding the legitimation of norms in relation to civil, political, or cultural rights. In this sphere of formal discursive encounters, the legal order achieves a degree of autonomy from the “self-evident authority” of ethical traditions.43 Without rehearsing Honneth’s detailed analysis of the origin of the uncoupling of rights and social esteem, it should suffice to indicate that he links the notion of universal human rights with the concept of respect. Legal rights confer to the individual the experience of respect, thus making “selfrespect” possible. Without self-respect, Honneth argues, there is no encouragement or motivating force to participate within the public sphere as an active member. A code of human rights confirms the freedom of the will with an institutional form of recognition. A system of law that affirms the

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universality of human persons is post-traditional in the sense that it makes possible self-respect without regard to the particular traits or ethical perspective of the individual. Honneth writes, What gives rights the power to enable the development of self-respect is the public character that rights possess in virtue of their empowering the bearer to engage in action that can be perceived by interaction partners. For, with the optional activity of taking legal recourse to a right, the individual now has available a symbolic means of expression whose social effectiveness can demonstrate to him, each time anew, that he or she is universally recognized as a morally responsible person.44

Closely associated with the creation of self-respect is the equally important significance of self-esteem. Esteem, for Honneth, is granted on account of solidarity created by the political and cultural valuation of individual accomplishments. Drawing on Hegel, Honneth links legal recognition with esteem without assimilating the two: “what makes esteeming someone different from recognizing him or her as a person is primarily the fact that it involves not the empirical application of general, intuitively known norms, but rather the graduated appraisal of concrete traits and abilities.”45 While legal recognition derives from respect that is given to the autonomy of other individuals, esteem is granted on the basis of one’s work. The corresponding disparagement of rights, through exclusion or the denial of recognition, leads to violations and complications with self-respect. The positive or negative evaluation of one’s own contributions to a legal and social order contribute to esteem or to violations of dignity. On the basis of love relations (particular) and legal relations (general) Honneth sees a link between moral and ethical life. Given that legal recognition is tied to the recognition of universal characteristics, the public character of legal responsibilities, Honneth sees the mutual accord of esteem as an act of solidarity: a form of relation that allows individuals to positively relate to and evaluate concrete traits and abilities. Esteem granting recognition is a social relation characterized by solidarity: the mutual valuing of accomplishments, although not in an undifferentiated way. He writes, In the internal relations of [social] groups, forms of interaction normally take on the character of relationships of solidarity, since each member knows himself or herself to be esteemed by all others to the same degree. This is because, to a first approximation, ‘solidarity’ can be understood as an interactive relationship in which subjects mutually sympathize


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with their various different ways of life because, among themselves, they esteem each other symmetrically.46

The denigration of social values, manifest in hate-speech or other forms of social insult, thus exacts a contradictory breakdown in mutual forms of recognition which are constitutive of any possible positive contribution to social well-being. Although Honneth sees human rights as an ever expanding project, inherent to a post-traditional system of law which recognizes value pluralism from the outset, he also notes that esteem is the location of a “permanent struggle” in which different groups compete with one another for recognition about the value and worth of their aims, ideas, and accomplishments.47 Thus in each sphere, love (self-confidence), rights (self-respect), and solidarity (self-esteem), Honneth detects a transgressive form that is contrary to the possibility of mutual self-realization and the possibility of democratic life. Each transgressive denigration is the result of a failure of recognition. Honneth is able to conclude from his analysis that struggles for recognition are constitutive of the moral core of a communicative ethics. REFLECTIONS ON HABERMAS’S AND HONNETH’S SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Habermas’s conception of the “me” as the shadow of the “I” is initially understood as an unquestioned sedimentation of the norms and expectations of a particular collective. At first, Habermas notes, the “me” is little more than an object of reflection, the constitution of the “I” retroactively grasped. Once an individual encounters an increasingly diverse set of normative expectations this “me” collapses as the previously unquestioned traditions and values are corroded and drawn into a vortex of ambiguity or controversy: e.g. when someone observes that you are not who you think you are this throws one’s self-image into a crisis. When this happens, Habermas argues that the “me” is gradually replaced not by a new set of traditions or values, but by the expectations of actual and potential partners in discourse, an internalized “generalized other.” In others words, the practical relation-to-self is transformed through social interaction into the expectation of a larger community of discourse of reciprocal role taking. In such cases the “me” ceases to be the object of the “I,” a private conscience, and is instead transformed into a truly moral conscience, an intersubjective agency that serves to guide individual behavior in a mature and public way rather than an immature and private way. The content of the generalized expectation is mature, in the sense of remaining

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relatively undetermined until participants in discourse engage in real debate and discussion. This transformation also entails an abstraction away from lived relations to increasingly generalized expectations. While Habermas sees this as coincidental with the conclusions of his formal-pragmatic analysis of communication, I think his approach neglects the experience of communication and intersubjectivity for which close contact with feminist theory and psychoanalysis proves to be illuminating. One of the crucial aspects of this transformation that Habermas does not adequately deal with is the imaginary basis of the “me” which is first achieved through identification with others. The “me” is a consolidation of collective representations and expectations, and is also the product of the active work of the psyche, both of its conscious and unconscious labor. In this sense, it would be more appropriate to identify the “me” not as a mirror of the collective representations of others, but more like a gradually congealing roux of sensations, emotions, and identifications, a product of a unique combination of private fantasy or imagination and imprints of public interaction. The “me” is thus not simply a mirror reflection of the traditions and values of a particular collective, but also a product of the particular and concrete social relations in which the individual plays a part. Accounting for this mediation is necessary in order to understand the relationship of the individual to the community and for the way in which sexual differentiation, for instance, is instantiated. Habermas contends that when traditional expectations become devalued there is a shift from a conventional to a postconventional viewpoint, suggesting that behavioral expectations shift from particular expectations to increasingly generalized expectations. Despite Habermas’s position that this happens equally for women and men, Seyla Benhabib has argued that this experience is highly gendered, and that the generalized expectation Habermas posits is itself a masculinist orientation.48 I would argue that the viewpoint of the generalized other is best understood as a particular fantasy projection rather than a structural condition of communication.49 This does not necessarily undermine the effectiveness or the significance of a particular imaginary for democratic politics. However, following Benhabib, it brings the emphasis of a critical theory back to the experience of communication rather than its so-called formal or structural features, illuminating in what appears to be a universal perspective as a gendered and masculinist, and therefore exclusive, viewpoint. Honneth’s work presents an innovative attempt to rethink some of the ongoing problems found in Habermas’s thought. In many respects, by locating the moral core of social and political conflict in the context of struggles


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for recognition Honneth does affirm a non-discursive component to moral relations. In particular, when he locates the fundamental experience of recognition as a balance between symbiosis and self-assertion, there is an irrevocable contention that morality is essentially, or indivisibly, constituted by a special kind of imaginary relation. The imaginary relation that constitutes symbiosis or attunement (Benjamin’s term) is trust, a feeling of intersubjectively sustained mutuality. This basic experience, as Honneth notes, is essential for any possible development of moral or ethical relations. On this point I am in agreement with his analysis. The problem I see with Honneth’s work, as a supplement and advancement to the work of Habermas, is the way in which he downplays the entwinement of intersubjectivity with fantasy by leaving fantasy in the sphere of loving relations.50 This lacuna produces a theoretical orientation insufficiently attuned to the importance of mediation between social spheres in the dialectics of intersubjectivity. To begin with, Honneth’s conceptualization runs a little too smoothly. His understanding of love and self-confidence, rights and self-respect, and solidarity and self-esteem blend together in a rather unobtrusive fashion. In other words, his account is too staged and evolutionary, and does not consider the mediated relation between these spheres of recognition; nor does Honneth address the possible incompatibility or antagonistic relation of such divisions: the colonization of loving relations by increasingly abstract and generalized relations, for example. Honneth’s anthropological framework begins with the premise that struggles for recognition express a normative dimension entailing the constant moral expansion of claims concerning individual and collective needs. This is given an empirical backing with regard to protest movements or political struggles that display evident moral categories having to do with forms of disrespect, insult, or humiliation. Honneth does this not to downplay the importance of equality, but to show that at the root of discourses about equality is a fundamental desire to be recognized and valued. He places such struggles in a theoretical schema of recognition, with subcategories corresponding to self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. As Maria Pia Lara notes, “each of these categories defines an ideal end-state of social development, a set of equilibrium points for social and moral progress.”51 In doing so Honneth charts frustrations in each sphere and a theoretical analysis that provides insight and suggestions for progressive social change. The problem that Lara identifies here is that Honneth’s analysis dramatically simplifies the relation between social structure and pathology. With regard to self-confidence, Honneth notes that this is made possible with the creation of “basic trust” which is necessary for establishing friendship and

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independence. What is missing in Honneth’s account is the mediated nature of confidence: “confidence, and the lack thereof, can be articulated culturally and regulated institutionally; it is not only or even primarily the result of socializing institutions.”52 In other words, confidence is a characteristic that can be gained not only in the familiar sphere of loving relations, but also in the public sphere through cultural structures that are institutionally available (literary salons, for example).53 The postulation that familiar relations can only take place in a “private refuge” is itself part a wider social structure and sex-gender ideology. This point undermines Honneth’s claim about the distinctiveness of each sphere. Furthermore, Honneth is also neglectful of the possible negative effects of self-confidence. Confidence is no guarantee against sexism, for instance. In itself, the development of self-confidence is no guarantee of moral progress. One might speculate that confidence poses a particular problem for moral thought. A confident individual, a person who is sure of their capacities, may in fact be resistant to encounters with others since they may take their own self image as enough. Confidence cannot be taken for granted as a basic moral category, “good-in-itself.” This is aggravated by the possibility of acquiring self-confidence outside familiar relations as well as the possible negative effects of self-confidence.54 Such considerations require an elementary rethinking of the concept in relation to struggles for recognition. In terms of legal relations, Honneth reads discourses about rights applicable to all human beings as an ever expanding spiral of legal inclusion. As can be shown with his understanding of loving relations and self-confidence, Honneth’s concept of rights is also a category developed in a relatively unmediated way. Two points can be made here. First, Honneth’s use of historical evidence as relevant to his overall anthropological argument about the moral imperative of recognition is dubious. Even if one grants that Honneth’s historical observations do express a general trend in the evolution of legal institutions cross-culturally, this does not confer the soundness of his anthropological conclusions about the moral necessity of recognition in the legal sphere. If one grants that mutual recognition is essential for the development of basic bonds of trust and confidence, this does not logically extend to the realm of universal human rights. Honneth may be able to make an anthropological case for the moral imperative of recognition on a familiar level, but using historical evidence requires an entirely different kind of justification to support a philosophical anthropology. Second, Honneth’s selective use of historical data is problematic. While he shows that in some areas law has increasingly become more abstract and generalized, extending its normative reach through the transformation of


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hierarchically organized state into horizontally defined communities, there are counterexamples that can be given. As historically counterpoints, Lara cites the apartheid laws imposed during South Africa modernity and the Nuremberg laws of German modernity. She further notes that the growth of legal regulation as such does not necessarily coincide with the recognition of moral capacity.55 Indeed, any “partialist” legal position, such as one that provides some sort of compensation for widespread cultural bigotry, for example, would appear backward or regressive in Honneth’s model. It would also appear that Honneth’s theoretical model may have difficulty negotiating the ethics of preserving cultural forms of life (bilingualism, for example) and the autonomy of individuals (the capacity to choose whether one wants to be part of one cultural group or another).56 Despite his attempt to introduce substantive forms of reasoning in tandem with the procedural and universalist legal framework he deploys, Honneth’s rather unmediated conception of rights and self-respect falls short of the possible range of moral resources and political responses available to disenfranchised individuals and groups. The location of a highly abstract system of human rights as the herald for universal humanity is one-sided. Honneth does not consider the possible negative implications of a progressively abstract system of law. This is all the more salient when it is noticed that familiar relations are not the only possible source of “confidence,” and that a practical relation-to-self can emerge by identifying with public institutional expressions or space. The relation of recognition to each of these fields is thus far more complex than Honneth’s analysis permits. Finally, in relation to solidarity and self-esteem, Honneth’s analysis suggests that mere participation in a community ethic can provide recognition. But this neglects the entwinement of shared values with culture at large.57 Insider solidarity, for instance, can be corroded through the very kinds of generalization or particularization that are definitive for Honneth’s understanding of a modern, post-traditional legal framework and familiar acculturation. Cultural groups may find themselves peripheral to “public” concerns and veritably alienated from the universal commonwealth. Although Honneth sees recognition on this level as granting esteem, his analysis is undifferentiated with regard to the intermingling of communities that share cultural values and the split that such values undergo in the separation of private and public spheres. Solidarity can motivate people toward participating in progressive social change, but not necessarily so. Again, Honneth’s account is not nuanced enough. Honneth’s commitment to an anthropological model, which despites its problems does much to address the relation between human interests and social conflict, seems to imbue his framework

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with a rather undialectical teleology, one which theorizes progress as a moral imperative, despite the difficulties. In short, it is necessary to illuminate the tension between the categories: love, rights, and solidarity, as well as elaborate on the tensions within these categories. JESSICA BENJAMIN: AN INTRODUCTION “For every paradise has its fall, every ideal its confrontation with reality.” Jessica Benjamin, “What Angel Would Hear Me?”

This phrase hints at the uncomfortable fact that every idealization finds its culmination not in fulfillment, but with the experience of contradiction; and intimates that if we are not careful, the dream of undistorted speech may leave us speechless. Given the problems found within Habermas’s and Honneth’s account, I address the prospect of developing a critique of the Habermasian concept of socialization and individuation drawing on the feminist psychoanalytic thought of Jessica Benjamin. Although Honneth draws on the analyses of Benjamin, he tends to limit the significance of her work to his discussion of love and self-confidence. This is in contrast to the way in which Benjamin herself works out a feminist critical theory as part of her psychoanalytic account. In what follows I will argue that the psychoanalytically informed critical theory of Benjamin provides an important rejoinder to that of Habermas and Honneth, which both builds on but also criticizes their conclusions. Benjamin’s psychoanalytic account of intersubjectivity is, at least in part, a rejoinder to the analyses of Adorno and Habermas. Aligning herself with the tradition of critical theory, she notes that Adorno’s thought offers a critique of identity through continual negation by means of self-reflection. This position allows Adorno to expose the absolutism or omnipotence of the thinking subject inherent to processes of identification but does not permit the full thematization of intersubjectivity. Habermas, however, provides an account of intersubjectivity drawing on Mead but does not thematize the “inevitable failure of recognition” that is constitutive of the dialectic of assertion and recognition. Benjamin observes, “[Habermas’s] notion of internalizing the other’s position does not distinguish externality from identificatory assimilation of the other” and further contends, “whereas Adorno bequeathed us the critique of identity without intersubjectivity, Habermas provided an entry into intersubjectivity, but without sufficient attention to the subject’s destructive omnipotence.”58 Seeking to provide an account of intersubjectivity that draws attention to sexual difference and maintains a productive


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tension between intersubjective and intrasubjective activity, Benjamin shows how psychoanalysis and feminist theory provide a cohesive and critical outline the dynamics and experience of recognition.59 Benjamin’s first book, The Bonds of Love, is an analysis of the interplay between love and domination. In particular, she seeks to understand how domination is anchored in the hearts of the dominated.60 She argues “domination and submission result from a breakdown of the necessary tension between self-assertion and mutual recognition that allows self and other to meet as sovereign equals.”61 The paradox of assertion and recognition rests on what is called “differentiation,” the slow task of distinguishing between fantasy and reality, self and other. The distinction between self and other, the ground of which is recognition, can only occur through a tension pulling in two directions simultaneously. Benjamin notes, “what Hegel formulated at the level of philosophical abstraction can also be discussed in terms of what we now know about the psychological development of the infant.62 The fact that Benjamin is indebted to Hegel’s narrative of lordship and bondage is noteworthy in relation to the writings of Habermas and Honneth who draw on this account as well, although situating themselves more comfortably in Hegel’s earlier writings which appear to articulate the theme of interaction to a greater degree. However, in contrast to Habermas, who is more interested in producing a theoretical reconstruction of the necessary conditions of mutual understanding, and Honneth, who attempts to articulate the moral grammar of struggles for recognition, Benjamin uses the concept of mutual recognition to extrapolate a number of intersubjective experiences: emotional attunement, mutual influence, affective mutuality and shared states of mind, which she elaborates as part of an intersubjective viewpoint.63 The intersubjective view in psychoanalysis refers to what happens in the field of the self and other and in the sphere of subject and object by focusing on the experience of intersubjectivity. Habermas, in contrast, is more interested in the epistemological and formal aspects of cognitive development: the capacity of the individual to raise validity claims and adjudicate between differences in a rational way. Focusing on the experience of intersubjectivity, Benjamin notes that the intersubjective view should not be opposed to an intrapsychic view, which she discusses in a more sustained way in her later work, Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995). Intersubjective theory, for Benjamin, sees the difference between the two as complementary ways of understanding the psyche, the inner world of fantasy, wish, anxiety and defense, and the external world of relationships.64 Benjamin’s work here is being introduced as a critical rejoinder to Habermas and Honneth who, in the final analysis, do not adequately deal

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with sexual difference or the significance of the intrasubjective dimension as a vital and affective aspect of intersubjective relations. Not only does her concept of intersubjectivity shed light on the inherent tendency toward aggression and domination, she also argues that when processes of mutual recognition run awry, a powerful motive for the acceptance of authority and the will to power can emerge. Her thesis, in its strongest formulation, argues that the subordination of women to men not only gives sanctuary to all of the archaic ideas about women and men, but also provides the ultimate rationalization for accepting all authority.65 GENDER POLARITY AND COMPLEMENTARITY: THE SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN Gender polarity underlies many of the familiar dualism of western thought: autonomy and dependency, active and passive, and so on. These coordinates, Benjamin argues, set the scene for the position of master and slave.66 She argues that the structure of domination can be traced from the relationship between mother and infant to the global images of male and female in culture at large, noting that such structures of domination are operative even while appearing to embrace equality.67 The binary opposition between masculine and feminine is typically expressed in what Benjamin calls complementarity, the wayward notion that women and men form two halves of a broken whole. She notes that this complementarity has two forms: conventional and postconventional, one expresses historical reality and the other a material possibility. In the conventional form of gender complementarity, masculinity devalues the feminine as its subordinate counterpart, and is constituted by a splitting, the projection of the unwanted elements of masculinity into the other. Postconventional complementarity, on the other hand, sustains the tension between contrasting elements “so that they remain potentially available rather than forbidden and the oscillation between them can be pleasurable rather than dangerous.”68 In contrast to the oedipal conventional form, postconventional complementarity recognizes the multiplicity and mutuality denied by the oedipal form, reworking its terms and disrupting its binary logic, leveraging its own negative tension between limit and transgression.69 Benjamin’s vision here approximates in a psychoanalytic form Adorno’s understanding between the tension of identity and non-identity. The balance of recognition and negativity is struck when the self is able to encounter the other in a noncoercive and reciprocal way. This balance should be understood in spatial rather than symbolic terms.70


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In its most elementary form, mutual recognition is a paradoxical mixture of otherness and togetherness. To elaborate this point, Benjamin draws on the experience of the new mother and an infant: “You belong to me, yet you are not (any longer) part of me.” Mutual recognition includes both a connection to the other and an awareness of an independent existence of the other. This balance is captured in concepts such as emotional attunement, mutual influence, affective mutuality, and the sharing of states of mind. Mutual recognition includes two active participants who help discover, shape, and create a view of the world together.71 Recognition highlights the irreplaceable importance of differentiation, the capacity to discern between self and other, and the ability to recognize the distinction between fantasy and reality. Thus, differentiation and decentering are at the centre of the intersubjective view.72 Benjamin notes that the significance of this viewpoint has been neglected in psychoanalytic inquiry in favor of a subject-object paradigm, characteristic of what she identifies as the intrapsychic or intrasubjective perspective. Differentiation requires reciprocity of the self and other, a balance of assertion and recognition.73 Recognition can only take place on the basis of an individual asserting some aspect of their own identity and having this assertion met with a recognizing response. Assertion expresses both authorship (moral accountability) and agency (autonomy) while recognition expresses the capacity to differentiate between an internal state of affairs and an external state of affairs, a distinction between an internal object of fantasy and an external reality, a concrete other. Assertion also corresponds with an aggressive will to power, a potentially destruction assertion of narcissistic omnipotence. Recognition, which is simultaneously a negation of the destructive aspects of the assertion, is integral to the formation of boundaries between self and other and between fantasy and reality. Recognition is understood best not as a given state, but as a tension between subjects, a “space inbetween,” and entails the recognition of subjective boundaries.74 Benjamin also uses Winnicott’s conception of “transitional space” and Ogden’s “analytic third” to explain this tension between sameness and difference.75 When the delicate tension of mutual recognition breaks down, and Benjamin argues that this is both inevitable and common, assertion can become a destructive form of aggression.76 This is characterized in her work with reference to Hegel’s conflict between lordship and bondage: “For Hegel every tension between oppositional elements carries the seeds of its own destruction and transcendence into another form. That is how life is. Without this process of contradiction and dissolution, there would be no movement, change, or history.”77 Benjamin argues, in agreement with Hegel and the tenets of classical psychoanalysis, that the self involved in this struggle

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begins in a state of psychical omnipotence.78 This absoluteness, the sense of being “one” and “alone” is the basis for domination and the master-slave relationship.79 Benjamin also notes that this hierarchy is also definitive for traditional conceptions of gender complementarity and characteristic of the subject-object paradigm, since the subject-object paradigm views the other as an object, not as a partner in dialogue, the emphasis is on control rather than mutuality. What is crucial here is that the breakdown in intersubjective relations is a necessary part of ongoing learning processes, it is potentially a complementary cognitive experience, only to the extent, however, that communicative relations can be resumed. The manifestation of aggression, which is prompted by an internally generated sense of omnipotence and alienation, occurs when boundaries between individuals are rendered insubstantial: “So if the mother sets no limits for the child, if she obliterates herself and her own interests and allows herself to be wholly controlled, then she ceases to be a viable other form him. She is destroyed, and not just in fantasy.”80 Reality, Benjamin observes, only makes an appearance through discovery, not through the total absorption of an external world, but as created and discovered through contact with the other, the experience of resistance to assertion. Since psychical reality is constituted internally, the discovering of reality marks a negation or, in Winnicott’s terms, a “destruction” of internal fantasy. Benjamin elaborates: Winnicott explains that the recognition of the other involves a paradoxical process in which the object is in fantasy always beings destroyed. The idea that to place the other outside, in reality, always involves destruction has often been a source of puzzlement. Intuitively, though, one senses that it is quite simple. Winnicott is saying that the object must be destroyed inside in order that we know it to have survived outside; thus we can recognize it as not subject to our mental control. This relation of destruction and survival is a reformulation of and solution to Hegel’s paradox: in the struggle for recognition each subject must stake his life, must struggle to negate the other—and woe if he succeeds. For if I completely negate the other, he does not exist; and if he does not survive, he is not there to recognize me. But to find this out, I must try to exert this control, try to negate his independence. To find out that he exists, I must wish myself absolute and all alone—then, as it were, upon opening my eyes, I may discover that the other is still there.81

Following Winnicott, Benjamin notes that destruction is an effort to differentiate, to discover if the other will survive. Thus, the destruction of the


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other in fantasy is the vital task of reality testing, the attempt to find a limit to oneself and a sense of where the other beings. The concept of destruction is precisely the intrapsychic dimension missing in Habermas’s account of subjectivity and intersubjectivity: the aggressive tendency, perhaps a tendency of drive or desire, of the psyche to “destroy” as a means of discovering reality. Ideally, destruction occurs “in fantasy” and not “in reality.” Habermas’s neglect of this phenomenon has led to his leveling of psyche experience into a rather linguistic and reductionist form, without sufficient attention to this more fragile balance of internalization, identification, fantasy, recognition, and negation. Without taking into account the process of internalization, the idea that everything in external reality must have an interior representation in order to register, Habermas’s account of subjectivity will inevitably be “disembedded” and “disembodied.”82 One of the key insights of intersubjective theory is the notion that sameness and difference exist simultaneously in mutual recognition. Domination begins with the attempt to deny dependency and is, Benjamin argues, a denial of the need for recognition, the idea that one can be independent without recognition.83 This concept of absolute independence can be detected in Habermas’s account of individuation; specifically, when he argues that the gesture of “self-positing” is the first step toward autonomy.84 Habermas’s hypothetical starting point is reminiscent of Hegel’s understanding of the sovereign ego characterized by an initial sense of loss instead of connection in confrontation with the other.85 Such a characterization of cognitive development, as Benhabib notes, is part of an imaginary device of moral and political theory wherein autonomy is viewed as the liberation of the self from any concrete context, “a strange world” where there is inexplicably “neither mother, nor sister, nor wife.”86 Instead of theorizing our initial encounters with others as a loss, Benjamin argues that early childhood relations can better be understood as a tension between connection and separation, assertion and recognition. Inherent to the tension between assertion and recognition is the possibility of a breakdown in the differentiating process of mutual recognition, the negation of the other by means of transforming the other into a complementary object. This occurs in predominant forms of masculinity: the reification of the subjectivity of women as concept. As a complementary object, woman is denied agency and negated as a partner in conversation. This leads to the systematic devaluation of women in society as a whole, a fact that goes unnoticed if gender and sexual difference are not taking into theoretical consideration. The possibility of breakdown is inherent to mutual recognition because recognition itself strives toward satisfaction, the enjoyment of otherness as

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well as sameness and difference. Commenting on the transformation of recognition and assertion into domination through the process of splitting, Benjamin notes: In splitting, the two sides [self and other] are represented as opposite and distinct tendencies, so that they are available to the subject only as alternatives. The subject can play only one side at a time, projecting the opposing side onto the other. In other words, in the subject’s mind, self and other are represented not as equally balanced wholes, but as split into halves.87

Splitting is a defense against aggression. It involves the setting up of a paradigm of complementarity. Benjamin notes that such complementarity is manifest in traditional gender conceptions, masculine and feminine, yet has been formulated philosophically in terms of subject and object. This binary opposition between subject and object is culturally coded as neutral but, as Benjamin argues, can be readily revealed as masculine.88 Her point here is not simply that we need to change our attitudes about gender in order to live with a greater degree of non-violence; rather, she observes that the bulk of the western philosophical tradition is itself conceived (unconsciously) along unacknowledged gender lines. Furthermore, Benjamin argues that the social separation of private and public spheres roughly corresponds with the distinction between feminine and masculine. As this separation intensifies as society is increasingly rationalized, this process of bifurcation replicates a breakdown in tension: The subject fears becoming like the object he controls, which no longer has the capacity to recognize him. As the principle of pure self-assertion comes to govern the public world of men, human agency is enslaved by the objects it produces, deprived of the personal authorship and recognizing response that are essential to subjectivity. On the other hand, private life, which preserves authorship and recognition, is isolated, deprived of social effectiveness. Thus society rationalization negates what is truly “social” in social life.89

Benjamin notes that formal procedures (like law) and abstract goals (like profit) also have a tendency to replace traditional values and serve to legitimate existing authority. This growing tendency toward impersonal relations is no longer an extension of personal power relationships (e.g. monarch, father) but an inherent part of the social and cultural structure of society. The


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neutrality of such “bureaucratic rationality” and “disenchantment” is an illusion created by the social relations themselves.90 Drawing on several examples, Benjamin notes that this veil of neutrality can be detected in philosophy and the sciences, where the outside world, the other, is always an object, the valorization of abstract justice lending false credibility to the most abstract common denominator at the expense of the individual, as well as the dividing line between public and private.91 This is illustrated when Benjamin observes that disenchantment inevitably stimulates the search for re-enchantment, a re-gendered version of society citing several examples of both the glorification of motherhood and political justifications of the separation of private and public.92 In contrast to these polarizing positions, Benjamin argues for envisioning and realizing a new kind of relationship between self and other. As she makes explicit, her feminist project has much in common with Marcuse’s conception of a “new science.”93 This entails a rethinking of the subject-object paradigm in light of the experience of intersubjectivity, for which a model of self-other is more appropriate. The kind of analysis proposed by Benjamin is certainly an anathema to the projects of Habermas and Honneth. For both, feminist theory and feminism are essentially engaged in struggles for recognition, and, for the most part, aimed at enlarging existing policies and politics of exclusion or bias. What is foreign to their respective communicative-theoretical frameworks is the possibility that the very structure of analysis, including the institutional separation of spheres (science, law, art) that are defended as integral to modernity, are heavily gendered. Even though Habermas, for instance, takes up the task of articulating an intersubjective view, his perspective is still encoded as masculine. In order to avoid this tendency, it is necessary to acknowledge and articulate the unresolved tensions between sexual difference and the institutional congealing of its conventional formulations. THE POWER OF NEGATION As indicated, Benjamin argues that domination and submission result from a breakdown of the tension between self-assertion and mutual recognition. Assertion and recognition are two poles of a “delicate balance” that is integral to “differentiation.” Differentiation, between self and other, subject and object, is what allows the self to realize its own agency and authorship in a tangible way.94 Early in her work, Benjamin uses the image of Escher’s birds, which appear to fly in two directions at once, as representative the fine balance of self-other reciprocity.95 We can also detect in this image the power

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struggle inherent to interactive relations. Benjamin argues that by examining unsuccessful interaction as a model, “we can see how the fine balance of mutual recognition goes awry.”96 Key to this tension is the dialectic of the assertion of the self and recognition of the other, the breakdown of which serves as the basis of domination.97 Benjamin interprets the master and slave conflict as follows: The ideal “resolution” of the paradox of recognition is for it to continue as a constant tension, but this is not envisaged by Hegel . . . the decisive problem remains recognizing the other. Establishing myself (Hegel’s “being for itself ”) means winning the recognition of the other, and this, in turn, means I must finally acknowledge the other as existing for himself and not just for me. The process we call differentiation proceeds through the movement of recognition, its flow from subject to subject, from self to other and back. The nature of this movement is necessarily contradictory, paradoxical. Only by deepening our understanding of this paradox can we broaden our picture of human development to include not only the separation but also the meeting of minds—a picture in which the bird’s flight is always in two directions.98

As Benjamin elaborates in her later work, The Shadow of the Other, negation proves decisive in this process. Following the thought of Winnicott, Benjamin observes that the recognition of the other involves a process of “destruction,” whereby the object in fantasy is always being destroyed by means of reality testing. Which is to say, “the object must be destroyed inside in order that we know it to have survived outside; thus we can recognize it as not subject to our mental control.”99 This is the heart of Benjamin’s reformulation of Hegel’s paradox. Destruction (of fantasy) is an effort of differentiation, a distinction between reality and fantasy. Quoting Winnicott, “While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.”100 The limits to our assertions, the tendency toward omnipotence, can only be recognized through the survival of the other, thus frustrating and contradicting the narcissistic delusion. For example, if the child is unable to relinquish the fantasy of omnipotence, she or he may be tempted to believe that they can become independent without recognizing the other person.101 Crucial is the way in which Benjamin recognizes a distinction between the other as an internalized object of fantasy and the external other, in reality. If, in cognitive development, the self first encounters the other as an object, not yet a full subject in the sense of a recognized and recognizing ego, then the other is first and foremost also an object of interior representation, an imagined


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partner subject to internal mental control and manipulation. This clarifies the active role of desire and fantasy in intersubjective relations. In particular, Benjamin’s thesis here does not establish private internal relations as derivative or parasitic on public socialization. Socialization and object relations are entwined not as relations between subject and object, but as relations of self and other. Again, this is in contrast to Habermas who provides a very different understanding of recognition. For Habermas, the utterances of the speaker are not understood as potential assertions of omnipotence, but are to be read pragmatically, as virtually automatic indications of solidarity and autonomy structurally built-in to the fact of communication. In effect, the speaker is always in the prototypical position of teleologically striving toward an ideal communicative community, fit with competent partners in dialogue. The problem lies in Habermas’s claim that the pragmatic structure of communicative can be theoretically divorced from the intrapsychic processes that constitute actual discursive encounters. It also becomes evident that breakdowns in communication will be viewed as pathological rather than as a necessary part of the delicate tension between subjects in mutual relations. Habermas’s theory makes it appear as though the reality of the paradoxes of the intrapsychic and the intersubjective are parasitic to the pragmatic structure of communication itself, which is why the analyst, for Habermas, must proceed monologically when constructing a theory of communicative competence on the one hand, and dialogically and therapeutically on the other. Any breakdown in communication, which may include “unreasonable” decisions within consensus building argumentation, are viewed by Habermas as pathological. For Habermas, all forms of aggression are pathological. From Benjamin’s viewpoint, it is necessary to distinguish between destruction in reality and destruction in fantasy, both of which are products of aggression with very different implications. In other words, aggressive has a productive role in everyday psychical life, it is through this tendency toward aggression that reality can make an appearance at all. Her view situates this tension in spatial terms rather than in symbolic terms. Hence, Benjamin envisions breakdown as part of the struggle for recognition whereas Habermas does not. In effect, Habermas’s theory is subject to a false expectation that emerges out of the fantasy projection of the (illusionary) expectations of generalized others. In contrast to Habermas and Honneth, Benjamin draws attention to the role of negation, arguing that omnipotence is and has always between a central problem for the self, “disavowed rather than worked through by its position as rational subject.”102 When aggression is disavowed rather than worked through it no doubt reappears in another place; Benjamin links this

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possibility with the subordination of women and the re-gendering of society. As indicated, Benjamin holds that omnipotence is a mental state of undifferentiation.103 In this state, she notes, we are unable to grasp differences between self and other and the independence of and likeness of the other as subject and agent. It is through the power of negation that such omnipotence is curtailed, and such encounters do not take place without some sort of power struggle, for which breakdowns are inevitable. In contrast to a more idyllic view, Benjamin argues that All negotiation of difference involves negation, often leading to partial breakdowns which we might call disruption. Breakdown, full rupture, is only catastrophic when the possibility of re-establishing the tension between negation and recognition is foreclosed, when the survival of the other for the self, of self for the other, is definitely over. By the same token, recognition does not require a full reconciliation . . . but rather something that is both “tensed and unstable—never quite aufgehoben or reconciled.”104

Giving recognition its due requires appreciation that “the need for recognition entails this fundamental paradox: at the very moment of realizing our own independent will, we are dependent upon another to recognize it.”105 Benjamin posits that the essence of the intersubjective perspective is this: “Where objects were, subjects must be.”106 The task of a psychoanalytic theory is to understand how this happens: how it is that through dialogue we can break up webs of identification and reversible complementarities. In conclusion, balance of recognition, which is the activity of negation in mutual reciprocity, is an ongoing kind of intersubjective process characterized by ruptures and experiences of attunement. The implication of Benjamin’s analysis for Habermas’s and Honneth’s social theory is the existence of an as of yet explored forms of communication, constituted not by the logic of communication but by the performances of the subject. This encapsulates the idea that speaking is not only a form of expression but also a form of acting: communicative theory must be examined both symbolically and spatially. Importantly, critical theory must provide an analysis of gender performance rather than simply looking to debunk nonparticularist validity claims. The separation of speaking and acting inevitably phases out the entwinement of language with the imaginary and the rich plethora of images and associations constitutive not only of the individual psyche but also our shared social institutions. Without attention to


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these imaginary structures, which are as material as they are ideological, Habermas’s critical theory threatens to develop a one-sided analysis, one that is at once insensitive to certain kinds of systemic power, such as the institutions of gender asymmetry and difference, and unable to grasp the wealth of motivations and fantasies that simultaneously separate and bind us together.

Chapter Six

Critique of Communicative Reason

As far back as Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas expresses an interest in Peirce’s distinction between three forms of inference (induction, deduction, and abduction) as expressing the constitutive elements of the selfreflection of the natural sciences. Abduction, Habermas suggests along with Peirce, “is the form of argument that extends our knowledge” further noting that “only abducting thinking impels the process of inquiry onward.”1 Quoting Peirce approvingly, Habermas agrees that “If we are ever to learn anything or to understand phenomena at all, it must be by abduction that this is to be brought about.”2 While abduction is the logic that generates new hypotheses through the critical process of “determinate negation,” the relation between determinate negation and abduction appears arbitrary if “test and assumption, action and hypothesis are related to each other only externally.”3 Thus abduction is situated in Habermas’s writings as a methodical practical response connected to the stabilization of behavior by means of ongoing learning processes. Qualitatively, the knowledge generated through the process of abduction serves “as a substitute for instinctive behavioral steering” and can be assessed with regard to the “realization of an interest” having to do with success simply in terms of technical control.4 As Habermas notes, concepts or beliefs are corrected and amplified in processes of syllogistic reasoning, “in which abduction, deduction, and induction supplement each other and mutually presuppose each other.”5 The goal, Habermas supposes, is behavioral certainty.6 Abduction is involved in processes of the self-adjudication of reasonable expectations. The relevance of impelling inquiry further is expressed as having the function of eliminating uncertainties through the acquiring of unproblematic beliefs. A belief, following Peirce, “consists mainly in being deliberately prepared to adopt the formula believed in as the guide to action” and “the establishment of a habit.”7 To avoid the implication that a belief 175

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is a behavioral rule and a habit of behavior, Habermas further qualifies this by observing that “a belief is a behavioral rule, but not the habitually determined behavior itself.”8 A belief is the habitual sedimentation of behavioral expectations that become “crystallized in concepts.”9 Abduction is the means through which the emerging subject engages in reality testing and the stabilization of behavior. This kind of self-reflection is ideal for guiding behavior under conditions of instrumental reasoning, a monological exercise. As suggested, even though abduction is primarily creative and generative, it is itself non-dialogical. As Habermas notes, dialogue develops on the basis of “the reciprocal recognition of subjects who identify one another under the category of selfhood (Ichheit) and at the same time maintain themselves in their non-identity.”10 Communicative action, as opposed to instrumental reasoning, “cannot be reduced to the framework of instrumental action.”11 The vital distinction is that “in the context of communicative action, language and experience are not subject to the transcendental conditions of action itself. Here the role of a transcendental framework is taken instead by the grammar of ordinary language, which simultaneously governs the non-verbal elements of a habitual mode of life conduct or practice.”12 Setting aside the language of “transcendental conditions” that Habermas has long since abandoned (replaced by his conceptualization of formal pragmatic conditions), it is evident that he envisions the preponderance of language as inviolately central to all forms of action. Since the formal conditions of communicative action are inherent to the structure of language, the individual, as a socialized and individuated person, is primordially “public.” While the significance of Habermas’s insights should not be neglected, it is evident to anyone familiar with psychoanalysis that such a vision of the psyche is remarkably hypostatized. If individual learning processes oriented toward the aim of replacing instinctive behavioral steering are guided by the self-reflection on actions in the instrumental realm, then each individual will no doubt modify inherited concepts or beliefs on a contingent and historical basis: through abduction, the individual forms particular habits befitting their unique life-context. In a sense, belief, as a guide for action, must be self-fashioned and tailor made for a particular context, otherwise such steering mechanisms would be hopelessly abstract. This fact, the situatedness of instrumental reason and its relation to conceptualization, should not be obscured when it comes to fathoming the dynamics of communicative action. Unfortunately, this is precisely what Habermas does. Language, in Habermas’s conception, is grasped as a public phenomenon, which seems to override its self-fashioning for the individual who then brings local expectations into public debate or adjudication. A communicative theory must


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respect this shared locality which can be expressed the social imaginary, suggesting that within modernity there are multiple social imaginaries and multiple utopian horizons. To explain this further, in “Moral Development and Ego Identity” Habermas adduces that at a high enough stage of development internal nature would be “moved into a utopian perspective” wherein “inner natural is rendered communicatively fluid and transparent to the extent that needs can, through aesthetic forms of expression, be kept articulable or be released from their paleosymbolic prelinguisticality.”13 This claim prompted the remark from C. Fred Alford that Habermas’s speculation about “the potential utter linguistic transparency of the psyche” and his critical remarks about the “end of the individual” in Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse are somewhat ironic because the communicative theoretical framework “simply does not allow for the end of the individual because in a certain sense there is no beginning of the individual.”14 In other words, Habermas’s assumptions about the public sphere and the nature of language forfeit the contingency of the individual speaker for the sake of a teleological model of development: the highest point of development is the rendering of inner natural as communicatively fluid. Habermas’s understanding of distortions in language as reversible forms of excommunication also suggests that he conceives of the mature subject as rigorously linguistic yet not rigorously contextual. His aphorism “What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language” has become almost an imperative.15 It is not necessary to rehearse this point further. What is of interest to me here is the more often neglected path that a subject must take on the way to becoming a subject. If language is what raises us out of nature, what exactly is the nature of the subject who has only partially entered into communicative maturity? It is at this point that several divergence aspects of Habermas’s writings begin to intermingle: his writings on early childhood development, social pathology, and religion. The child, the neurotic, and “nature peoples” are all oddly equated in Habermas’s work as being more or less in the same position. The equation is subtle but fairly consistent.16 First, the child is a being not yet drawn into the symbolic world, possessing a “natural” identity. Once identity is detached from bodily appearance, through the assimilation of symbolic generalities, “corporeal features such as sex, physical endowments, age, and so on, are absorbed into symbolic definitions” as the child takes on a role-dependent identity. Later, Habermas argues, the role bearer is transformed into a person who can assert their identities independent of concrete roles and particular systems of norms.17 Eventually the mature adult will be able to retract her or his ego “behind the line

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of all particular roles and norms and stabilize it only through the abstract ability to present oneself credibly in any situation as someone who can satisfy the requirements of consistency even in the face of incompatible role expectations.”18 Maturity is clearly defined along the lines of the ability to distance oneself from a particular identity in public conversation and debate. With regard to neurosis, Habermas argues that a pathological deformation takes place when the normal congruency between language and behavior is split. The “unconscious” designates the class of all “motivational compulsions that have become independent of their context” and proceed from need dispositions that are not sanctioned by society. Habermas sees such occasions as a disturbance and deviance of the self-formative process.19 When an individual is not able to stabilize their behavior in the face of contrary expectations, it is reasonable to assume the presence of an incongruence or concealed motivation. Finally, Habermas indicates that “mythic worldviews prevent us from categorically uncoupling nature and culture, not only through conceptually mixing the objective and social worlds but also through reifying the linguistic worldview.”20 Thus religious worldviews, ground in ritual or cultic praxis, are primarily undifferentiated, lacking the requisite abstraction necessary to differentiate between logically exclusive spheres of validity. The commonality between all three of these categories is a situation in which the individual cannot make clear demarcations between external objects and internal dispositions. The antidote for these forms of immaturity, neurosis (individual or communal), and mythological thought, is rationalization. Rationalization can be summarized as the overcoming of “systematically distorted communication in which the action-supporting consensus concerning the reciprocally raised validity claims . . . can be sustained in appearance only.”21 In other words, uncritical role bearing, manifestations of split off motivations, and collective ritual activity are all instances of the entwinement of fantasy and language. Habermas then asserts, but cannot demonstrate, that debates and interactions in the public realm, however indigent or fragmented, are somehow freer than those conducted instrumentally in private. Could it not be that communal interaction participates in differing forms of shared fantasies? Might not sexism, for example, participate in an “ideology of desire” that resembles collective or institutional narcissism, as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl argues?22 The same could be said about the complicated dynamics of religion and the use of religious language. What my observations call for is a more nuanced account of communicative rationality, one that does not assume a razor sharp distinction between instrumental and communicative forms of reasoning. I


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propose that a more sustained focus on desire and interest, communication and fantasy may assist in this task. CONCLUDING REMARKS After providing a brief introduction to the way psychoanalysis and concepts including emancipation have been taken up in the Frankfurt School, my second chapter argues that Habermas’s critical theory inadvertently severs the relation between the linguistic and non-linguistic elements of subjectivity. The third and fourth chapters argue that because of this Habermas cannot overcome the criticisms of Gadamer or hermeneutic inspired philosophical positions. Thus Habermas’s critical theory is a critical hermeneutics. This conclusion can be avoided if first, we turn to a theory of secular revelation, which can only be accounted for within a more nuanced understanding of subjective aesthetic reception, and second, if critical theory continues to methodically incorporate psychoanalytic research as part of its interdisciplinary project.23 Simply, the problem is this: what Habermasian communicative theory cannot adequately account for is the way in which the imagination and fantasy constitute the possibilities afforded and occluded by communication with others. Despite the occasional mention of fantasy or visions of the good life, Habermas has not consistently theorized the subject as constituted by desires, fantasies, and language nor attempted to theorize this relation in societal terms. In my view this failure accounts for the ongoing relevance and importance of studies including Jessica Benjamin’s writings on desire and domination, the relation between fantasy and prejudice in Young-Bruehl’s writings, or Renata Salecl’s understanding of anxiety and enjoyment. Each of these works in their own way suggests that domination cannot simply be accounted for in terms of systematic distortions in language. Rather, we must also account for the paradoxical desire to be dominated, the contradictory enactments of fantasy in sadism or masochism, and the disruptions of trauma-enjoyment. Another way of putting this is that Habermas early on translated Hegelian Spirit as communication, but this understanding of communication is as disembedded from history as Hegel’s Idealism. Habermas’s diremption of the interests of utopian yearning from human interests and desires into the structure of communication or the structure of democratic institutions is a notable symptom of this hypostatization. Having broken the link between the imaginary and the rationalizing, the theorization of ideology also seems to have evaporated. Despite this, Habermas’s earlier works are ambivalent, and it is through these writings that I think it is most plausible to reflect on and consider the potentials of a missed opportunity.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), ix. 2. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). 3. Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?,” in Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 31–56. These criticisms emerge from a variety of sources. James Bohman notes that Habermas’s critical theory presents us with a revised version of the “end of history” thesis in the form of the “end of ideology.” Deborah Cook observes that Habermas’s later works seems to suffer from a systematic neglect of any conception of “distorted communication” within existing political structures, further arguing that unlike Habermas’s vibrant Theory of Communicative Action, where Habermas maintains that existing political, cultural and economic systems enshrine a variety of systemic distortions, such as the colonization of the lifeworld by money, power and bureaucratic forms, Between Facts and Norms does not discuss the possibility of such systemic distortions as existing within democratic ideals or existing institutions at all. Maeve Cooke additionally comments on the curious disappearance of the utopian dimension in Habermas’s writings on law and democracy, in equal measure is the charge of conservatism levelled against Habermas by Martin Beck Matuštík and William Scheuermann. James Bohman, “When Water Chokes: Ideology, Communication, and Practical Rationality,” Constellations 7, no. 3 (2000): 392; Deborah Cook, “The Two Faces of Liberal Democracy in Habermas,” Philosophy Today (2001): 95–104, 99; Maeve Cooke, “Redeeming Redemption: The Utopian Dimension of Critical Social Theory,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 30, no. 4 (2004): 418; William E. Scheuermann, “Between Radicalism and Resignation: Democratic Theory in Habermas’s Between Facts and

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Notes to the Introduction

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

Norms” in Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Dews (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 153–177. An exemplar of this conformism is Habermas’s claim that within contemporary democratic institutions there is no “opposition between the ideal and the real.” Thus, it is thought, the normative core of a communicative morality is “partially inscribed in the social facticity of observable political processes” which amounts to a reconciliation between facts and norms. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 287. I have in mind his writings concerning the historians’ debate. Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983). Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991) and The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). Kenneth G. MacKendrick, “The Moral Imaginary of Discourse Ethics,” Critical Horizons 1, no. 2 (2000): 247–269. The writings of Slavoj Žižek that I found to be most compelling, however problematic, include: The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), and Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997). Some of the critical theorists most influential on my thought include C. Fred Alford, Seyla Benhabib, Jessica Benjamin, J. M. Bernstein, Susan Buck-Morss, Deborah Cook, Maeve Cooke, Axel Honneth, Maria Pia Lara, Martin J. Beck Matuštík, Thomas McCarthy, Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Albrecht Wellmer, and Joel Whitebook. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 3. My decision to side with Castoriadis can be situated as contrasting with concepts of the imaginary developed by Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and the Slovene School. Unfortunately, the imaginary remains relatively undeveloped within the entire tradition of critical theorizing. This is beginning to change. See John Rundell, “Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining Subjects in Tension,” Critical Horizons 2, no. 1 (2001): 61–92. For further details see “Sweets (Candies),” Laroussse Gastronomique (New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2001), 1172.

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13. Other less than subtle reasons for my use of this analogy have to do with the role of sugar in western culture, including its links with capitalism, colonialism, exploitation, and enlightenment. For the significance of sugar and modernity see Stanley Brandes, “Sugar, Colonialism, and Death: On the Origins of Mexico’s Day of the Dead,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39 (1997): 270–299 and Sydney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1995). For the relevance of other assorted spices and stimulants, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Vintage, 1992). 14. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 27–28; Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 43. 15. Andrew Edgar summarizes Habermas’s conception of the lifeworld as not merely a resource upon which one draws but also something that can be disputed. “It is fluid, and as much the focus of negotiation between people as it is the focus of taken-for-granted agreement.” Andrew Edgar, “Lifeworld,” in Habermas: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2006), 90. This correlates roughly with Charles Taylor’s understanding of the social imaginary, defined as “the way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 23. Similarly, as Benedict Anderson puts it, the imaginary is the means through which we feel connected with other people that we do not know, people whose interests may be very different from ours but with whom which we nonetheless feel some powerful and emotional affinity. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991), 6. 16. Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 17. I have adopted the phrase “ideologies of desire” from Elisabeth YoungBruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). 18. This distinction is articulated in Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social, trans. Charles W. Wright (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 61–91. 19. Martin Beck Matuštík, Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 28–30. 20. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1982), 199.

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Notes to Chapter One

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, trans. G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 1. 2. Ibid., 2, 3. 3. Hegel quoted in Horkheimer. Ibid., 4. 4. Ibid., 11. 5. Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 30. 6. Ibid., 33. 7. Ibid., 32. 8. Horkheimer formulates this explicitly in his essay “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and others (New York: Continuum, 1992), 199. 9. Metacriticism has to do not only with the categories at hand, but also with the conditions under which such categories are made possible. Metacritique, articulated in a more sustained way in Adorno’s work, should not be confused with transcendental criticism. See Simon Jarvis’s discussion of Dialectic of Enlightenment in Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), 11–15. 10. Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 43. 11. Ibid., 33, 35, 37. 12. Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 132. 13. Ibid., 129. 14. Prior to his appointment as director of the Institute for Social Research, Horkheimer’s interest in psychoanalysis was piqued by Frieda FrommReichmann. In 1928 he underwent analysis with Karl Landauer, one of the founders of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute (the first Freudian organization tied to a German University, housed in the same building as the Institute). For additional details, see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 41, 47, 54. 15. Horkheimer quoted in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973), 102. 16. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 56. 17. Erich Fromm, “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 492. 18. For Horkheimer’s analysis of the dissolution of the individual, see “Rise and Decline of the Individual,” The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974), 128–161. 19. The emphasis of the critical theorists on the tensions between society and the individual eventually led to the rejection of neo-Freudianism and revisionist


20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

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psychology. In brief, the Frankfurt School’s critique of psychoanalytic revisionism aimed at restoring a more critical and dynamic reading of Freud against those who are arguably more, or perhaps only, interested in a talking cure, an accommodating conformist psychology, than a social philosophy, a critical theory of society. The Frankfurt School’s hostility toward neoFreudianism in favor of a more critical reading led to the departure of Erich Fromm in 1939 as well as a complete break in the theoretical (and sometimes personal) relationships with other neo- or post-Freudian interpreters, including Anna Freud, Karen Horney, Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung, Clara Thompson, and Harry Stack Sullivan. Adorno and Marcuse each argued that the essence of psychoanalytic inquiry is historical, sociological, and individual. In other words, discerning psychoanalysis has a decisively political and theoretical dimension. Any shift in emphasis from the theoretical to the therapeutic as a principal articulation of psychoanalysis risks aggravating existing forms of domination and alienation, further obscuring the mediated relations between society and the individual and the mediated and materialist nature of psychoanalytic inquiry as a whole. The discarding of many of Freud’s key concepts, such as his Oedipal theory and his theory of sexuality, inevitably, in the view of the Frankfurt School theorists, discards the critical edge of psychoanalysis. Because the individual is threatened with dissolution, a psychoanalytic theory that addresses this dissolution apart from its social constitution is inadequate. The lack of autonomy is not a personal problem but a manifestation of social phenomena. Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 65. Ibid., 71–72. Ibid., 114–115. Ibid., 114, 118. The situation, what Adorno theorized as the end of internalization was thought to create the possibility of mass psychology and the conditions for fascism by habituating the individual into an unrestricted play of the id. This development led to a proliferation of literature, with varying intentions, lamenting the woes of a fatherless society. Several analyses of the Frankfurt School’s treatment of gender and the family can be found in: Jessica Benjamin, “The End of Internalization: Adorno’s Social Psychology,” Telos 32 (1977): 42–64; “Authority and the Family Revisited: or, A World Without Fathers?,” New German Critique 13 (1978): 35–57; Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, Woman, Nature, and Psyche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and Marsha Aileen Hewitt, Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), 110. Ibid., 113, 116. Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 9.

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29. For details, see Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 147–182. 30. Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 191. 31. Ibid., 198. 32. Ibid., 200. 33. Ibid., 194. 34. Ibid., 207. 35. Ibid., 208. 36. Marcuse quoted in James Schmidt, “Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Social Research 65, no. 4 (1998): 810. 37. Adorno quoted in Schmidt. Ibid., 809. 38. Max Horkheimer and Theodor. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 166, 167. 39. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2. 40. Ibid., 3. 41. Ibid., 6. 42. Ibid., 65, 68. 43. Deborah Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 14. 44. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 136. 45. Ibid., 27–28. 46. Horkheimer, The Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and others (New York: Continuum, 1974), 65. 47. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos 31 (1977): 120– 121. 48. Ibid., 126. 49. Ibid., 129. 50. Ibid., 130, 131. Gillian Rose, despite Adorno’s emphasis on negativity, calls Adorno’s exact imagination an exercise of “rational identity thinking.” See Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). See also Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). 51. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), xx. 52. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 50. This phrase may also be rendered as “totalization is false.” Read this way, then, the phrase is inversely coincidental with Hegel’s understanding, at least as conveyed in a biographical story about Hegel: When Hegel was asked by Heine what he meant by


53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

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the identity of the rational and the actual, he “smiled peculiarly and noted ‘It could also be rendered, everything that is rational must be.’” Having said that, Heine indicates, Hegel “looked hastily about him,” but was reassured when he saw that the only person who had overheard him was one of his lessthan-intellectually-inspired whist-playing friends. Cited in Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 497. What Adorno means here is an imaginative judgment about past potential. The failure of reconciliation is nonidentical with the concept of reconciliation which cannot be broached positively. This failure is given credence by the way in which reality is organized against the interests of human beings. See Adorno, Minima Moralia, 186. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 3. Jarvis, Adorno, 66. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 192. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 245. Ibid., 246. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11. Adorno, Critical Models, 246. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 22–23. Adorno, Critical Models, 248. Ibid. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 3. Ibid., 10. Ibid. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 25, 26. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 91. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 190. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17–18. Ibid., 27–28. Adorno, Critical Models, 254, 256. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5. Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology from Adler to Laing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 80. Adorno, Critical Models, 247. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5, 11; Adorno, Critical Models, 255. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 191; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 227. Ibid., 47. Adorno also notes that “timelessness” is a romantic bourgeois illusion. Ibid., 54.

188 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

113.

Notes to Chapter One Ibid., 141. Ibid., 149. Jarvis, Adorno, 21. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 135. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 154. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 4. Marcuse, Negations, xx. Marcuse, Negations, 182; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, xiv, xvii. Hegel quoted in Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 147. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, xx. See Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 62–82. Habermas’s critique of Marcuse will be discussed further in the next chapter. Jacoby, Social Amnesia, 31. Marcuse, Five Lectures, 20. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 231. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 35. Marcuse, Five Lectures, 18. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 37. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 44, 87. Ibid., 45. See also Marcuse, Five Lectures, 30. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 13. Ibid., 18, 28. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 18–19. Ibid. Marcuse, Five Lectures, 41. Although Marcuse is opaque on this point, it is consistent with recent studies on historiography, myth, and historical consciousness. See, for example, Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). It should also be noted that Marcuse is in no way privileging non-linear experiences, which could readily be an indication of psychosis and equally subject to ideological manipulation. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 24–29.

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114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

Ibid., 39 and following. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 14, 50. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 140–141. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 102. Marcuse, Five Lectures, 13–14. Ibid., 113, 115–117; Marcuse, Negations, 90–191. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 141–143, 160, 171. Ibid., 81, 172, 177, 188–193. Ibid., 197, 199, 204, 223, 228. Ibid., 201. Richard J. Bernstein, “Negativity: Theme and Variations,” Praxis International 1, no. 1 (1981): 91. 128. Jacoby, Social Amnesia, 44; Theodor W. Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology—II,” New Left Review 47 (1968): 88.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 301–317. 2. Ibid., 303; Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 254–255. 3. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, vii. Habermas’s analysis of freedom and the public use of reason (the ideals of the Enlightenment) can be found in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 4. Habermas’s systematic intent can be understood in the context of his postwar experience. After the liberation of Nazi Germany by Allied forces, Habermas came to recognize that the world in which he grew up was false. He recalls at the age of fifteen, “All at once we saw that we had been living in a politically criminal system. I had never imagined that before.” He came to see that this falsity not only extended across the political spectrum but was also entrenched within theoretical orientations. His critique of the social sciences is an attempt to rekindle the self-reflective and critical power of the sciences and break historical continuities between prewar and postwar cultural life. For Habermas, Nazism encapsulated a cultural rupture and a complete moral collapse, although not a collapse without precedents. Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas, revised edition, ed. Peter Dews (New York: Verso, 1992), 78. 5. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 308.

190 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

Notes to Chapter Two Ibid., 312; see also Habermas, Theory and Practice, 14. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 313. Ibid. Ibid., 314. Ibid., 315. Ibid. See also Habermas, Theory and Practice, 8. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 196. Ibid., 212. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 15. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 311. Ibid., vii. Ibid., 208. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 196. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 209. Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 118–119. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 312–313. Jürgen Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry A. Stark (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 25. I am indebted to Whitebook’s phrasing of Habermas’s thought here. See fn. 94. Ibid., 88. Habermas’s understanding of the return of contextualization leaves no room for the imaginary as anything but an authoritarian force in relation to cognition. This strikes me as a wholly unnecessary hypostatization of the potentials of fantasy. Ibid., 186. Ibid. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 314. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 142–169. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 194. Ibid., 195. Habermas is not completely clear on this issue. One the one hand he seems to see an evolutionary continuum between prelinguistic nature and human nature. As I will discuss below, this is indicated in Habermas’s understanding of animal life as the realm of private reasoning. On the other hand, Habermas indicates that there is a radical break with nature. These two positions are incompatible with one another although both can readily be found throughout his writings. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 144–145. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 153.

Notes to Chapter Two 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

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Ibid., 154. Hegel quoted in text. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 161. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 209–210. Jürgen Habermas, “The Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics: A Postscript to the Controversy between Popper and Adorno,” in Adorno et al, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), 137. Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, 153. Ibid., 163. Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), 56. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 256. Alfred Lorenzer, “Symbols and Stereotypes,” in Critical Sociology: Selected Readings, ed. Paul Connerton (New York: Penguin, 1976), 140. Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, 180–185. The concept of competence is developed by Habermas as a means of reconstructing what relations between anonymous idealized subjects might look like. Jürgen Habermas, “Summation and Response,” Continuum 8 (1970): 129. See also, Jürgen Habermas “Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence,” in Recent Sociology No. 2: Patterns of Communicative Behavior, ed. Hans Peter Dreitzel (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 114–148. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 398. I do not regard Habermas’s later position as defensible. By locating idealizing assumptions within the structure of communication Habermas inadvertently hypostatizes interaction and the different forms it takes. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, 24–25, 44–45. It strikes me that it is only out of convenience (or personal interest) that Habermas enacts this shift. There is no reason why a cross-culturally informed anthropological theory cannot provide convincing evidence of the interest structures that Habermas hypothetically articulate. Habermas makes this shift, it seems to me, in order to establish an unassailable universalism as present within the structure of communication as opposed to invariant interests. There is continuity in these positions but they are not identical. Although he argues, in his later work, that this is a formal-pragmatic condition of communication he cannot really escape the charge of it being transcendental simultaneously, otherwise it would situational, and therefore not decidedly universal in import. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, 102.

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54. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, 32–33; Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 113–114. This transition can be detected in his debate with Gadamer and is preliminarily sketched out in his 1971 Christian Gauss Lecture held at Princeton University. See Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 1–103. 55. Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction, 124–125. 56. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 22. 57. Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). 58. One of the most significant differences between the earlier writings of the Frankfurt School and Habermas’s critical theory is their different conceptions of the utopian longing. For Habermas, the utopian perspective is realizable and identifiable. For the Frankfurt School, utopian longing is situational, based on historical possibilities which are limited, however tragically, by existing states of affairs. 59. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 8, 14, 21. 60. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, 288. 61. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 19. 62. Ibid., 23. 63. Ibid. 64. Habermas clearly sees the tenor of his work to be integrative, but critics have observed that in this integration Freud is abandoned beyond recognition. 65. Ibid., 22. 66. By way of contrast, Horkheimer, in particular, did not view this kind of justification as necessary nor possible. 67. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 106. 68. Ibid., 116. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, 382. 69. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 119. 70. Ibid., 128. 71. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, 86. 72. Ibid., 88. 73. Ibid., 88–89. 74. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 285. 75. Jürgen Habermas, “Psychic Thermidor and the Rebirth of Rebellious Subjectivity,” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 74–75. 76. Ibid., 75–76. 77. Joel Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” Telos 40 (1979): 45.


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78. Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 48–49; Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 268. In Habermas’s essay, “A Reply to my Critics,” he indicates that “nature-in-itself ” is “an ironic refrain on the Kantian thing-in-itself in so far as it is meant to preserve in the nature constituted ‘for us’ the realistic connotations of a contingently existing reality independent of us.” Jürgen Habermas, “A Reply to my Critics,” in Habermas: Critical Debates, eds. John B. Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 242. 79. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 25; Habermas, Theory and Practice, 210. 80. Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 43. 81. Ibid. I am aware that the question of whether Habermas’s understanding of cognitive development can be considered teleological is contentious. See Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, 239. For a good discussion of this issue, see David S. Own, Between Reason and History: Habermas and the Idea of Progress (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 105–172. My thanks are extended to Gary Davis for conversations seeking to clarify Habermas’s position on this issue. 82. Ibid., 44. 83. Ibid., 46. 84. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 312; Habermas, Theory and Practice, fn. 38, 285; Habermas, “Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 3 (1973): 185. For a qualification to this idea, see Habermas, “A Reply to my Critics,” Habermas, 234. 85. Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 47. 86. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 312. 87. Habermas’s interest in debates about cloning and the ethical self-understanding of the species has led to the publication of a series of essays entitled The Future of Human Nature, trans. Hella Beister and William Rehg (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003). In these essays Habermas makes a strong distinction between the “nature we are” and the “cognitive equipment we give ourselves.” Ibid., 22. This distinction abides by many of the comments Habermas has made throughout his writings. He remains consistent in his distinction between the moral quality of human beings as communicative agents and the natural constitution of human beings. As far as I can tell, my reservations expressed here apply to his most recent writings as well as his earlier work, although the political situation and our technological capacities have changed. Habermas has recently further emphasized the theorization of continuities between nature and culture as a “weak naturalism.” This may revoke his claims about transcendence but certainly not about the pictorial aspects of the unconscious. See Jürgen Habermas, Truth and Justification, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 27–30. Full consideration of the difference between Habermas’s most recent

194

88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

Notes to Chapter Two remarks here and the range of his writings prior are beyond the scope of my position here. Today one might remark that evolutionary nature can not only be reconstructed in theory, but also indeterminably manipulated through technological intervention (see fn. 87). The prospect of unlimited manipulation of human nature is what brought Habermas into the recent debates about cloning. Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” fn. 28, 50. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 51. This point is made by Whitebook, Ibid., 60; Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, 73. Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 52. Ibid., 53. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 32–33. Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 55. Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, 69. Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 63, 66. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 148–177. Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 67. Ibid. Joel Whitebook, “Reason and Happiness: Some Psychoanalytic Themes in Critical Theory” in Habermas and Modernity, 151. Without arguing that some form of progress has occurred, it would be necessary to accept the possibility that disenchantment is a source of domination. Habermas illustrates the twin process of disenchantment and morally progressive insight in his book Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). He writes, “If by way of a thought experiment we compress the adolescent phase of growth into a single critical instant . . . [the] adolescent cannot . . . go back to the traditionalism and unquestioned identity of his past world, he must, on penalty of utter disorientation, reconstruct, at the level of basic concepts, the normative orders that his hypothetical gaze has destroyed by removing the veil of illusions from them.” Ibid., 126. Whitebook, “Reason and Happiness,” Habermas and Modernity, 153. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 155 (assuming Habermas had the intention of saving them). Ibid., 155–156. Ibid., 156; Habermas, “A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests,” 170.


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110. This point has been raised by several of Habermas’s critics. Notably, Agnes Heller, “Habermas and Marxism,” in Habermas, 21–41. 111. Whitebook, “Happiness and Reason,” 159–160. 112. For purposes of relevance I will limit my discussion to Whitebook’s critique of Habermas without engaging his theory of sublimation. 113. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 6. 114. Ibid., 10. 115. Ibid., 13. 116. Ibid., 166–167. 117. Ibid., 179. 118. Ibid., 180. 119. The concept of imaginary is used here similarly to Castoriadis: the “elementary and irreducible capacity of evoking images.” Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 127. 120. Freud quoted in Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 180. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid., 180–181. 123. Habermas quoted in Nägele. Rainer Nägele, Reading After Freud: Essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan, and Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 81. 124. Freud quoted in Nägele. Ibid. 125. Habermas quoted in Whitebook. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 185. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid., 185–186. 128. Ibid., 186. 129. Ibid., 192. 130. Ibid., 195. 131. Habermas, “A Reply to my Critics,” 240. 132. Ibid.; Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 287. 133. Habermas, “A Reply to my Critics,” 241. 134. Ibid., 247. Habermas’s statement clearly indicates that the communicative subject literally transcends its ties to nature, which is now simply conceived as prehistorical. 135. Ibid., 244. 136. Ibid., 245. 137. Ibid., 246. 138. Ibid., 247. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid., 248.

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141. Ibid., 250. 142. Jürgen Habermas, The Past as Future: Jürgen Habermas Interviewed by Michael Haller, ed. and trans. Max Pensky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 94. 143. Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 109. 144. Jürgen Habermas, “Questions and Counterquestions,” in Habermas and Modernity, 213. 145. Ibid., 215–216. 146. Habermas quoted in Cooke, Maeve, “Between ‘Objectivism’ and ‘Contextualism’: the Normative Foundations of Social Philosophy,” Critical Horizons 1, no. 2 (2000): 219–220. Habermas further adds that any glimpse behind the stage set by the human mind can only be metaphysical. Jürgen Habermas, Truth and Justification, 22. Although I cannot discuss this further here, it will suffice to say that I think Habermas’s comment is unnecessarily overstated. A psychoanalytically informed theory of imagination or a theory of the unconscious need not necessarily be conceived of as disclosing metaphysical truths. 147. Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (New York: Verso, 1995), 154. 148. Ibid., 155. 149. Interestingly, in 1971 Habermas made explicit this very dilemma. He remarks, “For these is no historical society that corresponds to the form of life that we anticipate in the concept of the ideal speech situation. The ideal situation could best be compared with a transcendental illusion.” Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction, 103. Habermas later retracts this formulation yet in a certain sense it may have been correct. Habermas, “A Reply to my Critics,” 261. 150. Habermas has recently addressed some of these issues in his essay “Introduction: Realism after the Linguistic Turn.” Here he also makes explicit that the concept of a shared objective world is in fact a weak metaphysical assumption requiring an assumption of the continuity between the natural and social world, theorized in terms of natural and social evolution. Habermas, Truth and Justification, 1–49. 151. Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 157.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 29. 2. There are some exceptions to this. For a vitriolic critique of Habermas’s position see Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).


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3. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, volume one, trans. Thomas McCarthy. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 102–141. 4. Jürgen Habermas, “The Hermeneutic Claim to University” in Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and Critique, ed. Josef Bleicher (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 190. 5. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 29–30; Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas, revised edition, ed. Peter Dews (London: Verso, 1992), 162. 6. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 299. 7. Ibid., 299–300. 8. I should mention, of course, he is under no obligation to do so. The issue I have in mind is one of continuity with the Frankfurt School. 9. Adorno quoted in Jacoby. Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology from Adler to Laing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 27–28. 10. Ibid., 122. 11. Freud quoted in Jacoby. Ibid. 12. As a speculative example, one might imagine that linguistic meaning is itself a product of distortions in perspective, veritably the exact opposite position that Habermas takes. 13. Jack Mendelson, “The Habermas-Gadamer Debate,” New German Critique 18 (1979), 44. 14. Graeme Nicholson, “Answers to Critical Theory,” in Gadamer and Hermeneutics, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1991), 152. 15. I am thinking here of the more or less sympathetic works of Seyla Benhabib, Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, and Albrecht Wellmer. 16. Gary B. Madison, “Critical Theory and Hermeneutics: Some Outstanding Issues in the Debate,” in Perspectives on Habermas, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 463. 17. For a proposal arguing for the compatibility of hermeneutics and critical theory see Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” Contemporary Hermeneutics, 236–256; Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, eds. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 298–334. 18. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reply to My Critics,” The Hermeneutic Tradition, 287. 19. Ibid., 293. 20. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Critique of Ideology: Metacritical Comments on Truth and Method,” in The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1994), 275.

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21. Ibid., 279. 22. Gadamer, “Reply to My Critics,” 283. 23. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 490. Habermas’s comments here are indicative of his ongoing concerns about the distinction between justice and the good life. Similar passages expressing this concern can be found throughout his writings. This sentiment is also mirrored at the end of his essay “Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking” where he notes the “religious language is the bearer of a semantic content that is inspiring ad even indispensable.” Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 51. 24. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 109. See also Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 487: “Naturally, even a proceduralized “popular sovereignty” of this sort cannot operate without the support of an accommodating political cultures, without the basic attitudes, mediated by tradition and socialization, of a population accustomed to political freedom: rational political will-formation cannot occur unless a rationalized lifeworld meets it halfway.” 25. Habermas later indicates that complete transparency within society is not an underlying ideal within his work, which seems to me to beg the question of the potential sources of distorted communication and prejudices within democratic societies. Jürgen Habermas, “A Reply to My Critics,” in Habermas; Critical Debates, eds. David Held and John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 235. 26. “As I understand it, this question [how a procedural concept of democracy can link up with empirical investigations that conceive politics primarily as an arena of power, KM] does not imply an opposition between the ideal and the real, for the normative content I initially set forth for reconstructive purposes is partially inscribed in the social facticity of observable political processes. A reconstructive sociology of democracy must therefore choose its basic concepts in such a way that it can identify particles and fragments of an “existing reason” already incorporated in political practices, however distorted these may be.” Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 287. 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reply to Jacques Derrida” in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, eds. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palme (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 55. 28. This critique is made by Jacques Derrida, “Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer” in Dialogue and Deconstruction, 52–54. 29. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 102. 30. Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), 357.


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31. Dieter Misgeld, “Science, Hermeneutics, and the Utopian Content of the Liberal-Democratic Tradition. On Habermas’ Recent Work: A Reply to Mendelson,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 129. 32. The concept of the “last meta-language” is used in the context of Habermas’s discussion of the reconstructive sciences to demonstrate that reflection cannot be conceived as endlessly self-reflective without contradicting itself. 33. William E. Scheuerman, “Between Radicalism and Resignation: Democratic Theory in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms” in Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Dews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 169. Scheuerman writes, “Given the fundamental difference between these two forms of power [communicative and administrative, KM], is not the task of translating communicative into administrative power inevitably destined to remain highly enigmatic? Does this undertaking not risk the alchemists’ attempts to ‘transform’ base metals into gold—that is, an inevitably doomed attempt to transform one set of elements into an altogether different set.” 34. Seyla Benhabib’s brilliant critique of “the generalized other” in political philosophy from Hobbes and Hegel to Rawls and Habermas is a paradigm of what I have in mind. For details, see Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992). 35. “The potential of unleashed communicative freedoms does contain an anarchistic core. The institutions of any democratic government must live off this core if they are to be effective in guaranteeing equal liberties for all.” Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, xl. 36. Gadamer, “Reply to my Critics,” 292. 37. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 30–31. 38. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, 212. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 213. 41. McCarthy’s question about what working through would mean on a political level is in fact answered by Habermas in the Historians Debate (1986/1987). What is interesting about this debate, aside from its crucial political relevance, is the way in which Habermas succeeds in articulating a notion of working through on the political level. Ironically, it is in this political intervention that Habermas can be most closely identified with the interests and aims of the Frankfurt School in contrast to the tenor of many other aspects of his theoretical project. Without entering into the details of the Historians Debate, which have been discussed in detail elsewhere, it should be noted that Habermas here brings to bear a series of utopianguided insights, usually ignored by the more analytic and pragmatic readers of Habermas, having to do with anamnetic solidarity with the victims of history, the weak messianic power of communicative thinking, and the need for redemption in the absence of theodicy.

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42. J. M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1995), 58. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 61. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 63. 48. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 260–261. 49. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, 64; Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 261–262; Jürgen Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. Shierry Weber Nicolsen and Jerry A. Stark (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 162; Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 102. 50. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, 64. 51. Ibid., 68. 52. Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and Illusion: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 144. 53. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, 69. 54. Ibid., 70–71. 55. Ibid., 75. 56. Ibid., 76. 57. Ibid., 81. 58. Ibid., 82; Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 232. 59. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, 84. 60. Ibid., 85. 61. Maeve Cooke makes a related point, in a different context, when she argues that Habermas can only show the conceptual priority of communicative action, not the moral priority of communicative (versus strategic) action. Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 19. 62. Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998), xvii. 63. For example, Habermas writes with regard to democracy, “If one can still speak of “embodiment” at all, then sovereignty is found in those subjectless forms of communication that regulate the flow of discursive opinion- and will-formation in such a way that their fallible outcomes have the presumption of practical reason on their side.” Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 486. 64. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, 86. 65. Ibid., 87.


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66. Albrecht Wellmer, Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 203–236. 67. Ibid., 203 68. Ibid., 204. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 205. 71. Ibid., 219. 72. Ibid., 205. 73. Ibid., 204. 74. Ibid., 206. 75. Ibid., 207. 76. Ibid. 77. Such examples of “blind” understanding are relatively common in jokes. For example: A bereaved woman goes into a funeral home to make arrangements for her husband’s funeral. She tells the director that she wants her husband to be buried in a dark blue suit. He asks, “Wouldn’t it just be easier to bury him in the black suit that he’s wearing?” “No,” she insists. “It must be a blue suit.” She then gives him a blank check to buy one. When she comes back for the wake, she sees her husband in the coffin and he is wearing a beautiful blue suit. She tells the director, “That is absolutely perfect! I love it! How much did it cost?” He says, “Actually, it didn’t cost anything. The funniest thing happened. As soon as you left, another corpse was brought in, this one wearing a blue suit. I noticed that they were about the same size, and asked the other widow if she would mind if her husband were buried in a black suit. She said that was fine with her. So, I switched the heads.” Another example, reputed to be the funniest joke in the world, deals with an analogous situation: Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: “OK, now what?” On a more sober note it is possible to discern different kinds of prejudices. Following Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s research, it is possible to detect similar behavior while wildly different “ideologies of desire” underlying them. For instance, an obsessional, hysteric, and narcissist may all share a particular behavioral pattern, or even share a metaphor—but how this operates for them will be quite different in each case. See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 200–252. 78. Wellmer, Endgames, 208. 79. Ibid., 207. 80. Ibid., 209. 81. Ibid.

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Notes to Chapter Four

82. Ibid., 211. 83. I have in mind Amy Richlin’s essay, “Making Up a Woman: The Face of Roman Gender” in Off With Her Head! The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture, eds. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and Wendy Doniger (Berkeley: University of Califonia Press, 1995), 185. 84. Wellmer, Endgames, 212. 85. Ibid., 214. 86. Ibid., 218. 87. Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 47. 88. Wellmer, Endgames, 223. 89. Ibid., 223. 90. Ibid., 224. 91. Ibid., 225. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 228. 94. Ibid., 229. 95. Ibid., 231. 96. Ibid., 235. 97. Ibid., 236. 98. Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 158.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), 484. 2. A dialectical image is the construction of images and concepts in such a way that it produces a “shock” or “shudder” in the experience of the object. Art does not intend to produce this, it is simply the potential of art to have this effect on the receptive subject. Philosophically, the dialectical image intends to produce the shock, using the concept against itself. 3. In Adorno and Benjamin’s thought, phantasmagoria is one of several concepts often deployed together along with fetish, reification, enchantment, fate, and myth. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 55. 4. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 67, 121, 205. 5. Buci-Glucksmann quoted in Cohen. Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30. 6. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 389, 463, 464, 486.


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7. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 99–100. 8. Habermas, for example, argues that there is an undialectical aspect to Adorno’s work. If all reception is determined by the culture industry, then the culture industry is an absolute power from which nothing escapes. This issue is complicated by Adorno’s stylistic approach, which draws upon the strength of situational rhetorical polemics as much as it does careful analytical judgments. I will not solve this issue here except to say that Adorno stylistically inserted aesthetic images or metaphors into his philosophical analysis in order to creatively manifest a tension between the literary and essayist form of philosophy and its objective and transient content. This runs parallel to their reading of Homer’s Odyssey, diagnosed as containing a tension between the mythological content of the narrative and its epic form. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 35 and following. 9. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 3, 6. 10. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 464, 473. 11. As Buck-Morss notes, “The young Benjamin believed in the possibility of metaphysical knowledge of the objective world—‘absolute’ philosophical experience of truth as revelation—and held that (against the basic tenet of idealism) it would not end up showing him his own reflection.” BuckMorss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 13. 12. Benjamin observes that today theology is “wizened and has to keep out of sight.” Likewise, Adorno pursues this insight by arguing that “nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the realm of the secular, the profane.” In both Benjamin and Adorno, theology is secularized without being discarded. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books), 253; Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 136. My reading of Benjamin and Adorno would no doubt be disputed by theorists interested in salvaging religion as a critical-modern resource. See the interpretation of the Frankfurt School theorists by Eduardo Mendieta as an example of this approach. Eduardo Mendieta, “Introduction: Religion as Critique: Theology as Social Critique and Enlightened Reason” in The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1–17; Eduardo Mendieta, “Introduction” in Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 1–36. 13. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 159. For Benjamin, commodities subsume historical consciousness. For example, when the automobile replaces the bicycle and the much despised “scorchers” the sidewalks for pedestrians

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

Notes to Chapter Four shrink even further, leaving no room for someone walking to even pass by without having to duck into a retail shop. See, for example, Jeffrey Charles and Jill Watts, “(Un)Real Estate: Marketing Hollywood in the 1910s and 1920s” in Hollywood Goes Shopping, eds. David Desser and Garth S. Jowett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 81; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 182. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 100. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 20. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 118. Benjamin quoted in Buck-Morss. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 67; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 458. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 114; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 4. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 160. Benjamin, Reflections, 179, 189. Benjamin, Illuminations, 202. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 116. Benjamin quoted in Buck-Morss. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 219; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 475. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 219; Benjamin, Illuminations, 255, 262; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 462, 463, 475. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 101; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 79. Adorno quoted in Buck-Morss. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 228. Ibid., 243. Benjamin remarks in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that “our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.” Benjamin, Illuminations, 254. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460; Cohen, Profane Illumination, 44. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 392. Theodor W., Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum Press, 1973), 4–6; Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 118. Deborah Cook instructively notes that “no matter how diverse and nuanced . . . meanings may be, the fact remains that all these meanings, qua meanings or concepts, still function as universals, subsuming particulars.” She further notes that “for Adorno, no one of the many meanings a word may have in a given context is identical to the particular; as universal, each of them says both more and less than the particular.” Deborah Cook, The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 83–84. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 118.

Notes to Chapter Four 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

205

Ibid., 27; see also 115. Ibid., 347. Ibid., 30, 34, 319, 340. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 72, 154. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 80, 104. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 331. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 15. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 15, 16. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 3. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 23. Ibid., 5, 22. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 13. Ibid., 286. Ibid., 259. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 269. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 20, 260. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 106. Žižek’s work relies quite heavily on Lacan and he has, at times, identified himself as an orthodox Lacanian. However, to ease the burden of the consistent use of a secondary source (Žižek) as plausibly distinct from the primary source (Lacan) all references will be assumed to be Žižek’s appropriation of Lacan. In other words, all references to Lacan in this section are references to Žižek’s reading of Lacan. The veracity of Žižek’s reading is set to the side throughout. Also, all italics in the original have been deleted unless otherwise noted; I have preserved higher case designations for the concepts Imaginary, Symbol, and Real as found in Žižek’s work but not used them outside of specific citations. 67. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 8–9. 68. Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 325.

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69. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Critique of Ideology: Metacritical Comments on Truth and Method” in The Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum , 1994), 290. 70. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. (London: Verso, 1993), 29, 71. Ibid., 30. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 31. 74. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 37. 75. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 31. An anamorphic entity is a malleable image. It is ordinary and everyday on the one hand, yet, when viewed from another perspective, it explains “everything.” In other words, it is an image that, in a certain light, puts it all together as a kind of quilting point or suture for the fragmented world of the symbolic. The attribution of a figure that “explains everything” is what Žižek calls “the sublime object of ideology.” See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989); Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. (London: Verso, 1991), 16–20. 76. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 33. 77. Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 144. 78. Ibid., 166. 79. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 65. 80. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), 11. 81. Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 27. 82. Ibid., 50. 83. Lacan, The Ego In Freud’s Theory, 164. 84. Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom, 17. 85. Ibid., 25. 86. Ibid., 21. 87. Ibid., 22, 23. 88. This problem has been discussed in relation to the work of John Rawls. See Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism (New York: Routledge, 1994). When, for example, Habermas argues that existing democracy instantiates, more or less, the contexttranscending moral norms found in discourse ethics he is also justifying the network of relations that sustain such an institution structure: the separation of public and private, the dynamics of private ownership, and so on. Several feminist theorists, including Seyla Benhabib and Marie Fleming, have outlined strong criticisms of Habermas’s project as harboring an ideological blindness to gender.


207

89. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 44. 90. Ibid., pp. 43–45. This notion is also thematic for Žižek’s The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000). 91. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 13. 92. Ibid., 21. 93. Martin Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas, and the Problem of Communicative Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 189. 94. Ibid., 188; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 191, 192. 95. Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn, 191. 96. Contrary to Benjamin and Adorno, there is no real thematization of reconciliation in Žižek’s thought. When Žižek discusses relations as “real” he is arguing that they are inherently antagonistic, and he sees fidelity to the antagonisms having a loosely democratic potential. While this coincides with Adorno’s comment about right thoughts in the wrong world being impossible, it does not have the same kind of anticipatory utopian dimension found in the Frankfurt School. Instead, Žižek is more prone to discuss the fantasy relation or the need for an ethnocentric “muscular universalism” for which the designation utopian does not apply. 97. The concept of “trauma” is used by Žižek in a philosophical sense, not to be equated with a clinical understanding of trauma. I understand Žižek’s use of trauma to mean rupture and dislocation rather than injury or pain as such. The definition found in Laplanche and Pontalis is a clinical definition. Trauma: “An event in the subject’s life defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organism. In economic terms, the trauma is characterized by an influx of excitations that is excessive by the stand of the subject’s tolerance and capacity to master such excitations and work them out psychically.” Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 465. To be explicit on this point, I want to distance myself from Žižek’s terminological use of the word “trauma” while retaining its philosophical merits. While the concept of “trauma” is an indelible part of the Lacanian edifice, I wish to underscore that the point I am making concerns the disruption of petrified subjective forms in ways that can be interpreted as hurtful or non-violent. The concept of revelation I am developing should be viewed as distinct from “traumatic” experiences as such. The “shock of recognition” could be considered “traumatic” only in the sense that the hardened form of the subject is shaken beyond its instrumental capacities. I do not understand this experience to be traumatic in a clinical sense. The lynchpin here is that such experiences can also prompt a progressive or creative development from consciousness to self-consciousness, the development of

208

Notes to Chapter Five

98.

99.

100.

101.

102. 103. 104.

105.

106.

the capacity for self-reflection; trauma in the clinical sense is both painful and destruction and not coincidental with such processes. Thus I wish to preserve the ambiguity of developmental potentials in experience. For details regarding the significance of social boundaries, anxiety, opening and closure, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Routledge, 2002). The imaginary is the substratum of all possible signification and positing. It is non-conceptual. Fantasy, in contrast, is an apt term for the production of a scene stemming from the intervention of language upon this conceptually indeterminate strata. In some respects, the writings of Axel Honneth can collectively be taken as philosophical and political interventions designed to reverse distorted perceptions of these forms of political struggle that were initially castigated by Habermas’s critical theory. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 126. Ibid., 126, 127. Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom, 27. In addition to the study by Salecl already mentioned in fn 88, see also Renata Salecl, On Anxiety (London: Routledge, 2004) for additional remarks on the relation between fantasy and anxiety. Let me emphasize the speculative nature of my remarks here. In order to justify such a distinction it would be necessary to provide social historical and comparative evidence. Agnes Heller, “Habermas and Marxism” in Habermas: Critical Debates, eds. John B. Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 22.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 1. Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 171. 2. Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), 142–169. Habermas’s earlier discussion of Mead can be found in Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, volume two, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 77–111. See also Jürgen Habermas “From Kant to Hegel and Back Again—The Move Towards Detranscendentalization,” European Journal of Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1999): 129–157. 3. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996). 4. Ibid., 92.


209

5. Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 226. 6. See my essay “The Moral Imaginary of Discourse Ethics,” Critical Horizons 1, no. 2 (2000): 247–269. 7. Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 47. 8. Ibid. 9. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 152. 10. Ibid., 173. 11. Ibid., 174. 12. Ibid., 152. 13. Ibid., 193–200. 14. Ibid., 153. 15. Ibid., 171. 16. Ibid., 172. 17. Ibid., 175. 18. Ibid., 177. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 179. 21. Ibid., 180. 22. Ibid., 181. 23. Ibid., 183–185. 24. Ibid., 188. 25. Ibid., 190. 26. Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Charles W. Wright (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 208. 27. This formulation of Honneth’s work can be found in Maria Pia Lara, Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere (Berkeley: University of California Press), 131. See also Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 172. 28. Lara, Moral Textures, 131. “The reproduction of social life is governed by the imperative of mutual recognition, because one can develop a practical relation-to-self only when one has learned to view oneself, from normative perspective of one’s partners in interaction, as their social addressee.” Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 92. 29. Ibid., 94. 30. Ibid., 95. 31. Ibid., 95. 32. Hegel quoted in Honneth. Ibid., 96. 33. Ibid., 95. 34. Ibid., 96, 97. 35. Ibid., 98.

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36. Ibid. For further details on Honneth’s reading of Winnicott, see Ibid., 98– 107. 37. Ibid., 104. 38. Ibid., 106. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 107. 41. Ibid., 107. 42. Ibid., 109. 43. Ibid., 110. 44. Ibid., 120. 45. Ibid., 113. 46. Ibid., 128. 47. Ibid., 127. 48. For details, see Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 148– 177. 49. I think a similar conclusion is reached from the Lacanian informed analysis of masculinity by Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London: Routledge, 1991). 50. Whereas Honneth leaves fantasy in the realm of loving relations, Habermas seems to banish fantasy from the non-pathological constitution of subjectivity altogether. In a critique of Habermas C. Fred Alford observes that the private realm of the individual not a central concern for Habermas. “This is so not merely because Habermas’ theory is abstract, and not merely because Habermas emphasizes the public more. It is rather because in Habermas’ model of the individual there is really no place for the private.” C. Fred Alford, “Habermas, Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis, and the End of the Individual,” Theory, Culture and Society 4 (1987): 24. 51. Lara, Moral Textures, 132. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 133. For an analysis of the women’s place in literary salons and the courts, see Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 54. Two examples of highly problematic manifestations of “confidence” (selfrighteous and sacrificial, respectively) can be found in C. Fred Alford’s study of evil and Ernst Becker’s analysis of attitudes toward death. C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) and Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973). 55. Lara, Moral Textures, 133, 134. 56. See, for example, Amy Gutmann, ed. Multiculturalism, Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). See also Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).


211

57. Ibid., 135. 58. Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998), 92, 93. 59. It should be noted that I do not mean to conflate epistemology with experience. I see the two as quite distinct. However, if it is the experience of recognition that is situated at the core of communicative ethics, then it is the dynamics of this experience, as mediated, that must be taken into consideration, not only the problems of articulating a moral philosophy or moral theory of discourse. 60. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 5. 61. Ibid., 12. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 16. 64. Ibid., 20–21. 65. Ibid., 7. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 8. 68. Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects, 73. 69. Ibid., 76, 78. 70. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 126. 71. Ibid., 15, 16. 72. Ibid., 19. 73. Ibid., 25. 74. Benjamin, Shadow of the Other, xii. 75. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 41, 44; Benjamin, Shadow of the Other, 28. 76. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love., 28. 77. Ibid., 32. 78. Ibid., 33. 79. Ibid., 32. 80. Ibid., 39. 81. Ibid., 38. 82. Benhabib, Situating the Self, 166. 83. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 52. 84. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 152. 85. Benhabib, Situating the Self, 156. 86. Ibid., 157. 87. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 63. 88. Ibid., 184. 89. Ibid., 185. 90. Ibid., 186–187. 91. Ibid., 190–197. 92. Ibid., 206.

212 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

Notes to Chapter Six Ibid., fn. 191. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 38. Winnicott quoted in Benjamin. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 52. Benjamin, Shadow of the Other, 85. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 96. Richard Bernstein quoted in text. Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects, 37. Ibid., xii.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX 1. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 113. This remains Habermas’s position. As indicated in the previous chapter, Habermas holds that the subject “must form better hypotheses through abduction out of the rubble of the invalidated representations” and “reconstruct a collapsed interpretation of the situation.” Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 174. 2. Peirce quoted in Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 114. 3. Ibid., 124, 125. 4. Ibid., 134. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Peirce quoted in Habermas. Ibid., 120. 8. Ibid. The term Habermas uses is Überzeugung which can also be translated as “conviction.” The distinction may be worth making since Habermas is not using the term Glaube, faith or belief although the concepts are related in English and German. 9. Ibid., 121. 10. Ibid., 138. 11. Ibid., 137. 12. Ibid., 192. 13. Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 93. 14. C. Fred Alford, “Habermas, Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis, and the End of the Individual,” Theory, Culture and Society 4 (1987): 24. For Habermas’s

Notes to Chapter Six

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

213

critique of the various theses regarding the “end of the individual” see Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, 72. Alford readily cites Habermas’s later claim that “I do not regard the fully transparent society as an ideal, nor do I wish to suggest any other ideal . . .” from “A Reply to My Critics.” Habermas cited in Alford, “Habermas,” 20; Habermas’s quote can be found in Jürgen Habermas, “A Reply to My Critics” in David Held and John B. Thompson, Habermas: Critical Debates (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 235. It should be noted that Habermas comments here that he does not regard the fully transparent society as an ideal (a comment dealing with criticism from a very different context). Alford’s criticism does not pertain to a fully transparent society but to a fully transparent inner nature, and ideal I do not think Habermas would reject. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 314. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, volume one, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 44. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, 85. Ibid., 85–86. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 271. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, volume one, 51. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, 120. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). In addition to Bernstein and Wellmer’s writings, Pieter Duvenage’s Habermas and Aesthetics: The Limits of Communicative Reason (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003) and Lambert Zuidervaart’s Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991) should also be mentioned.

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Index

A abduction 150, 175–176 Adorno, Theodor W. 5–6, 18–30, 72, 164, 187n53, 203n12 aesthetics 126–130, 134, 138–140 passim, 145 and Benjamin, Walter 119–121, 126, 138, 140, 202n3 experience 28–30, 126–130 Habermas’s critique 58–60, 66 and Hegel 26, 28, 186n52 identity and non-identity 110, 162, 164 metacriticism 184n9 negative dialectic 126–130 psychoanalysis 83, 185n24 see also art, Dialectic of Enlightenment, non-identity, recognition, utopian motif aesthetics 10, 30, 119, 179, 203n8 Adorno, Theodor W. 126–130, 134, 138–140 passim, 145 imagination 36 see also art, experience, narrativity agency 4, 6, 150–152, 157, 164–169 agreement 56, 93, 98, 142, 155 blindness in 109–111, 115 as distorted 52 as semantic 87 see also communicative action, consensus, recognition, understanding Alford, C. Fred 177, 210n50, 210n54, 212n14 anamnesis 26, 129

anamnetic solidarity 71, 74, 199n41 anthropocentrism 63, 72 anxiety 28, 141, 143, 163, 179, 208n98 and ambivalence 21 and experience of art 128, 134 and fear 19, 21, 25 Apel, Karl-Otto 81, 107 argumentation 70, 106, 135 theory of 55, 118, 144 art 7, 70, 100, 105, 128, 138, 126 Adorno, Theodor W. 29, 118, 126–130, 134, 138, 145 as autonomous 58, 127, 128, 138 Benjamin, Walter 120, 202n2 Freud, Sigmund 69 Marcuse, Herbert 31, 36–38 see also aesthetics Austin, John 53 authority 29, 47, 164, 168 authoritarian personality 14 and the family 15–16 production of 13 Studies on Authority 15 see also domination, pathology autonomy 44–47, 61, 149–150, 155–156, 161, 167 in relation to art 58, 127, 128, 138 gender 164 Horkheimer, Max 18 moral 7 and solidarity 47, 55, 171 see also ego, consciousness, communication

237

238 B beauty 37–38, 103 behaviorism 43, 45 belief 175–176 Benhabib, Seyla 1, 9, 167, 182n10, 197n15 critique of Habermas 64, 148, 199n34 gender 158, 206n88 Benjamin, Jessica 9, 113, 149, 162–173, 179 desire 6, 106 and Hegel, G.W.F. 163, 165, 166, 167, 170 fantasy 148 love 154 theory of recognition 116 see also domination, experience, fantasy, recognition Benjamin, Walter 114, 119–126, 142, 145, 202n3, 203n12 and Adorno, Theodor W. 119–121, 126, 138, 140, 202n3 and Marx, Karl 63, 122, 125 utopian desire 136–140 see also experience, recognition, utopia motif Bernstein, J. M. 9, 101–107, 114, 141 Bernstein, Richard 38 Bourgeois 42, 58, 70, 83, 129, 137 household 15–16, 19 individuality 39 Buck-Morss, Susan 121, 123, 124, 202n3, 203n11

C Castoriadis, Cornelius 3, 4, 66, 188n11, 195n119 causality of fate 46–47, 50, 102, 105, 106 Chomsky, Noam 64, 81 cognitive developmental theories Benjamin, Jessica 170 Habermas, Jürgen 78–79, 95, 99–104, 153–154, 163, 193n81 Cohen, Margaret 125 commodity fetishism 18, 27 form 29, 120, 122, 125–126, 137

Index communication breakdowns 9 as distorted 40 and freedom 57, 80, 86–87, 104, 107, 145, 199n35 and imaginary 4 and rationality 8 undistorted 54–56, 94–99, 149, 162, 167 see also communicative action, reason, pathology communicative action 64–65, 70, 72, 97, 151, 176, 200n61 definition of 48 and lifeworld 81 and repression 51 and science 89 and tradition 49 see also agreement, consensus communicative competence 56–57, 81, 84–86, 104, 114, 171 and psychoanalysis 57 consciousness 24–26, 35–36, 42, 123 as distorted 17, 27, 29, 88, 129 emancipation of 31, 82, 97 as mindfulness 6 moral consciousness 95 nonlinguistic aspects 5, 66, 68, 75 philosophy of consciousness 43, 55, 139, 147 regression 19, 51, 80 relation to aesthetics 128–129 and self-reflection 41, 48–49, 63, 106, 150–152 see also communication, development, ego, reification consensus 98, 143, 171, 178 blind spots see agreement, blindness in and coercion 98 community of investigators 42 and rationality 54, 64 as semantic 87, 112 successful communication 111 unconstrained 47 Cook Deborah 181n3, 204n34 Cooke, Maeve 181n3, 200n61

Index D decisionism 113, 141 desire 41, 97, 113, 115, 123–126, 149 defined 6 as emancipatory 6, 12, 53, 136 ideologies of 6, 40, 178, 201n77 and instincts 37 and language and recognition 159, 171 repression of 51 Žižek’s concept 132, 134–139 development 19, 34, 76, 124 cognitive 95, 101–102, 153–154, 163, 167, 193n81 and psychoanalysis 78–79, 81, 100, 170 cultural and social 61–62, 64, 87, 159 instinctual 75 moral 65–66, 153–154, 177 and narrative 104, 141 see also rationalization, social evolution Dews, Peter 74 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 18–25, 85, 128–129, 139 Habermas’s critique of 58, 203n8 see also myth and enlightenment differentiation 29, 104, 145, 163, 165, 169–172 see also gender, sexual differentiation Dilthey, Wilhelm 51 discourse 64, 89, 99, 100, 152 imaginary 4, 5 moral theory 71, 74, 153 psychoanalysis 57, 80, 85, 92, 157–159 see also communication disenchantment 122, 130, 169, 194n103 nature 61 world 20 domination 39–41, 85–86, 126, 179, 184n9, 194n3 Benjamin, Jessica 149, 163–164, 166–170, class relations 21–22 and communication 92 and consensus 112 and discourse 64 Marcuse, Herbert 36–37

239 and memory 35 of nature 10, 19, 60, 64, 65 and repression 33–34 see also authority, repression dreams 40, 125, 133, 137 and enlightenment 97 language 2, 51–52, 67–70, 97 drives 14–15, 32, 39, 46, 49–50, 59, 65 see also instincts

E egalitarian reciprocity 72 ego 33, 49, 73, 106, 170 as determined 36 false idealizations of 27–28, 39, 167 regressions in development 20–21 relation to prehistory 126 self-reflective 20, 140, 151–152, 177 splitting of 52, 80 spontaneous 12 see also autonomy, consciousness, development emancipation 10, 41–45, 50, 53, 64, 86, 179 Horkheimer, Max 12, 18 Marcuse, Herbert 30–31 enlightenment 18–21, 41, 46, 85, 122, 130 and dreams 97 epistemology 25–26, 41, 44, 53, 55 ethics communicative 62–63, 74, 147 discourse 7, 71–74, 206n88 existential dignity 74, 75, 103 good life 71, 76, 95, 153, 179, 198n23 sympathy 71, 73–74 see also morality, norms experience 5–6, 8, 88, 121, 139, 176 Adorno’s conception 28–30, 126–130 aesthetic 91, 138 Benjamin, Jessica’s conception 162–169 Benjamin, Walter’s conception 121–126 and dialogue 57, 82–84, 87, 111–112, 151, 158–159 diminishment of 19, 27 Marcuse’s conception 32, 35 narration 104–105, 108 and revelation 118–119, 139–144

240 and social labor 48–50, 63 Žižek’s conception 131–134 see also reification, revelation

F fantasy 91, 109, 113, 122, 123, 158 Benjamin, Jessica’s conception of 163– 167, 170–171 and communication 148–149, 159, 178, 210n50 “exact imagination” 23, 29, 30, 186n50 frames 110, 135, 139, 141–144, 208n99 and ideology 149, 179 Marcuse’s conception of 30–31, 36–40 Žižek’s conception of 132, 135, 207n96 see also dreams, phantasy fatherhood 16, 19, 37, 168 feminist theory 7, 158, 162, 169, 206n88 Feuerbach, Ludwig 66 Fichte, Johann 25, 48 formal pragmatics 54, 62, 75, 78, 98, 101, 118 definition of 56 and Gadamer, Hans-Georg 78, 98 Fraser, Nancy, 2 freedom see autonomy, communication, ego Freud, Sigmund 39, 89, 97, 133, 184– 185n19 and Frankfurt School 13–15, 18–19, 28, 31–36, 83 Habermas’s reading of 51–59, 65–69, 79, 81, 84, 99–101, 105, 107 Fromm, Erich 14–15, 22, 184n19

G Gadamer, Hans-Georg 4, 108, 112, 131, 140, 145, 179 debate with Habermas 7–8, 77–78, 80–84, 96–99, 114–115 see also hermeneutics, language gender and difference 111, 135, 149, 160, 164–169, 172–173 sexual difference 149, 162, 164, 167, 169 good life see ethics

Index H Habermas, Jürgen Adorno, critique of 58–60, 66 cognitive development 78–81 95, 101 passim, 141, 153–154, 163, 167, 170, 193n81 critique of ideology 50–52 Dialectic of Enlightenment, critique of 58, 203n8 Freud, reading of 51–59, 65–69, 79–85, 99–101, 105, 107 Gadamer, debate with 7–8, 77–78, 80–84, 96–99, 114–115 Hegel, interpretation of 48–49, 105, 147, 179 Horkheimer, critique of 40 imaginary 47 labor and interaction 47–50 Marcuse, critique of 58–59 Marx 7, 42, 50, 63, 66, 99 nature 45–50, 58–59, 69–73, 80, 82, 143, 177–178, 190n32, 193n87, 213n14 and psychoanalysis 79–85 recognition 149–152, 176 theory of human interest 43–45 theory of nature 45–47 see also agreement, argumentation, communicative action, communicative competence, consensus, formal pragmatics, ideal speech situation, knowledge and human interest, modernity, performative contradiction, reason, reconstructive science, self-reflection, social evolution, understanding. happiness 64–65, 73, 76, 85, 100, 124 as interest of critical theory 10, 19, 30–31, 36–38, 136 Hegel, G.W.F. 18, 32, 37, 42, 105, 155– 156, 163, 167 and Adorno, Theodor W. 26, 28, 186n52 Habermas’s interpretation of 48–49, 147 history 12 social philosophy 11–13

Index Heidegger, Martin Adorno’s critique of 22 Heller, Agnes 144 hermeneutics 79–94, 112, 115, 131, 135, 145 critical hermeneutics 84–85, 107, 114, 117–118, 140, 179 depth hermeneutics 51, 80, 86 passim, 101, 114, 118, 140 see also language historicism 38, 41 Honneth, Axel 3, 9, 169, 171–172, 208n100, 210n50 critique of 159–162 and Hegel, G.W.F. 147–149, 152–157 Horkheimer, Max 11–22, 24, 39–40, 44, 71, 76, 144, 177, 184n14, 192n66 Habermas’s critique 40, 58, 60, 66 and Hegel, G.W.F. 11–12, 13, 18, 26 and Marcuse, Herbert 30, 31, 32 and Marx, Karl 12, 13, 14, 18 see also Dialectic of Enlightenment human interests 41–47, 52–54, 57, 75, 103, 161, 179 Husserl, Edmund 25, 109 hypostatization analytic dissolution of 82 of language and communication 2, 8 118, 176, 179 of liberal democratic tradition 95 of subject and object 25, 27, 40 see also reification

I idealism 12, 25–28, 41, 45, 63, Hegel, G.W.F. 179 ideal speech situation 52, 87, 106, 114, 134–135, 196n149 see also communication ideology as distortion in communication 44, 50–52, 54, 89, 113 emphatic conception of 23, 149 “end of ideology” 181n3 identity thinking 28, 134 ideologies of desire 6, 40, 178, 201n77

241 as naturalization 31 Lacanian conception 134–137, 143, 206n75 and memory 35–36, 122 passim and psychoanalysis 14 and sex-gender 160, 206n88 and transcendental subject 26 see also ideology critique, reification ideology critique 8, 50–52, 56–58, 99 illusion 27, 95, 97, 122, 142, 169 imaginary 93, 118, 139–140, 148, 158– 159, 208n99 Habermas’s conception of 47 relation to meaning 108–109, 131, 172 see also social imaginary individuation 45, 50, 61, 64–65, 147–150, 167 instrumental action 49, 50, 96, 176 see also reason, instrumental interests 6, 13–14, 50, 54, 91, 144 emancipatory 12, 42, 54, 179 hermeneutic 78 practical 54, 57, 82, 85, 90 technical 85, 90 instincts 5, 61 Freudian conception of 13, 19, 32–36, 39, 49 see also nature

J Jacoby, Russell 28, 32, 34 Jarvis, Simon 23, 184n9 justice 22, 66, 71 passim, 73, 76, 95, 198n23 Benjamin, Jessica 169 and the good life 153 as interest of critical theory 7, 12, 23, 42

K Kant, Immanuel 25, 26, 28, 42–45, 48, 50 knowledge and human interests 41–45, 52–58 see also epistemology Kohlberg, Lawrence 56, 81, 104

L labor 26–27, 41, 45, 47–50, 87–88, 129, 158 Marcuse, Herbert 34, 38

242 Lacan, Jacques 3, 131–132, 134, 137, 205n66 see also Žižek, Slavoj language fused with power 87 fusion of horizons 92, 103, 112–113 and images 47 linguistic meaning 85, 88, 108–109, 112 197n12 see also communication, understanding Lara, Maria Pia 159, 161 Lear, Jonathan 6 liberal democracies 2, 76, 91, 94–95, 97, 113 lifeworld 52, 56, 81–82, 98, 183n15, 198n24 rationalization and 76, 100, 150 Lorenzer, Alfred 51 Löwenthal, Leo 14 love 29, 147, 153–157, 159, 162–163 maternal 16 Lukács, Georg 17, 18

M Madison, Gary 84 Marcuse, Herbert 18, 30–39, 76, 177, 188n112 and existential dignity 74, 103 Habermas’s critique of 58–59 Hegel, G.W.F. 32, 34, 37 and Marx, Karl 34, 38 new sensibility 144, 169 see also utopian motif Marx, Karl 12–14, 34, 63, 66, 122, 137 materialism 15, 45, 63, 65 McCarthy, Thomas 53, 94, 100, 104, 199n41 Mead, George Herbert 81, 147–155, 162 memory 27, 34–37, 48, 123, 151 as distorted 35 Mendelson, Jack 84 modernity 58, 66–67, 70–72, 91, 106, 169 modernist imaginaries 95–96, 177, 183n15 see also disenchantment, rationalization morality 12–13, 44, 75, 143, 182n3

Index moral imaginary 148, 159 moral theory 74, 153 post-conventional 65, 104, 152, 155 as value sphere 70 see also ethics, norms Morris, Martin 138 motherhood 15–16, 164–167, 169 mysticism 58, 63, 141 myth and enlightenment 8, 18 passim, 47, 65, 85, 129 mythic thinking 27, 30, 121, 128, 178 see also causality of fate, nature, nonidentity, second nature

N Nägele, Rainer 68–69 narrative 9, 76, 82, 109, 115, 141–143 as transfiguring 101–107 narrativity 82, 76, 88, 108–109, 115, 141–143 selfhood 81–83, 101–107, 132–133 naturalism 75, 193n87 nature 28, 30, 74–76, 100, 137, 148, 194n88 Adorno, Theodor W. 28 Benjamin, Walter 123 Habermas, Jürgen 45–50, 58–59, 69–73, 80, 82, 143, 177–178, 190n32, 193n87, 213n14 Horkheimer, Max 13, 16 internal (instincts) 18–21, 32 passim, 49, 73–75, 148, 175–176 Marcuse, Herbert 31, 32–36, 59 in-itself 67, 71–72, 75, 106, 108, 193n78 second nature 32, 35, 47, 50–51, 80, 89, 121, 122, 126 see also disenchantment, Whitebook, Joel negation 26, 28, 40, 129, 169–172, 175 neuroses 177–178 see also pathology Nietzsche, Friedrich 18, 25, 58 norms 51, 73–75, 103, 141–144, 177–178, 183n15, 206n88 and communication 1, 52, 55, 60, 65, 70, 106 and hermeneutics 85, 87, 92,

Index internalization of 15, 61, 149–157 normative ideals 44, 55, 64, 96–97, 100, 159, 182n3 see also ethics, morality non-identity 24, 27–28, 110, 115, 164, 176 and art 126–127, 133, 138–139, 142

O objectivism 44, 62 objet petit a 132–133 ontology 44, 99

P pathology 38, 51, 59, 105, 96, 148–149, 154 in communication 9, 50–51, 82, 99, 105, 114, 171 social and political 2, 61, 82, 87, 141, 159, 177 see also language, regression performance 4, 151–152 assumptions 56 contradiction 58 idealizations 96, 101 language-use 53–54, 75, 111 see also praxis performative contradiction 58 Peirce, Charles 175 phantasy 6, 36, 66, 73, 93 Piaget, Jean 56, 81 pluralism 65, 143, 157 positivism 18, 20, 41, 42 praxis 59, 97, 125, 178 argumentative 118 hermeneutic 89 narrative 102, 107, 109 revolutionary 123, 139, 145 self-reflection 44, 80–81 social labor 50 therapeutic 88, 117 see also praxis, psychoanalysis prejudice 78, 91–93, 97, 114, 179 psychoanalysis as emancipatory inquiry 50–52, 56–57, 78 and Frankfurt School 13–15 passim and hermeneutics 79–84, 99–101 intersubjective view see Benjamin, Jessica

243 Lacanian 130–136 and narrative reconstruction 101–107 therapeutic aspects 56–57, 78, 83–84, 114, 131, 140

R rationalization 19, 36, 91, 102, 168, 178 and disenchantment 65, 98, 100 see also modernity, reason rationality see reason reason 19, 26, 30–36, 42–46, 64 communicative 48, 52–53, 61, 72, 90, 95–96, 175–179 communicative rationality 47–49, 59, 89, 95–96, 138, 142, 178 critique of 8, 21, 23, 32, 58, 72 cunning of reason 18, 26, 128 instrumental 16–18, 29, 48, 52, 59, 66 as reflection 4, 6, 44, 45, 54 as sensuous 38 as substantive (or emphatic) 3, 10, 13, 23–24, 72, 129 recognition 29–30, 105, 107, 115, 139– 145, 211n59 Adorno’s conception 22, 29, 129 Benjamin, Jessica’s conception 162–173 Benjamin, Walter’s conception 120, 121, 124, 138, 207n97 Habermas’s conception 149–152, 176 Hegel’s conception 6, 37, 147 Honneth’s conception 148, 152–157, 159–162 misrecognition 131 mutual recognition 48, 109, 148, 165, 209n28 Žižek’s conception 131 reconciliation 19, 28, 76, 172 and art 129, 138 and cunning of reason 26 as failed 23, 187n53 Habermas’s conception 52–54, 58, 60, 71 as utopian anticipation 39 Whitebook’s critique of Habermas 64, 66 as “working through” 142 see also utopian motif

244 reconstructive science 86, 90–98, 100, 104–107, 199n32 definition of 8 and psychoanalysis 56, 88 regression 70, 129 of the ego 19–20, 38, 39, 46 social and political 36, 61 see also nature, pathology reification 17, 34, 61, 122–123, 138, 167, 202n3 and instrumental action 50 relativism 28 religion 13, 72, 100, 177, 178, 203n12 renunciation 21, 31, 47 repression 33–37, 51, 80, 102, 105, 140 language 51, 79 social 30, 47 see also domination reproduction cultural 37, 46–48, 59, 91, 209n28 species 43, 53, 59 revelation 88, 106 grimace of the real 130–136 materialist 9, 115, 117–119, 139–145, 179 profane illumination 119–126, 203n11 shudder 126–130 Ricoeur, Paul 66, 70, 197n17 romanticism 67

Index self-preservation 35, 42, 46, 52, 59, 74, 129 social amnesia 34, 122 social evolution 45, 87, 101, 153, 196n150 social imaginary 6, 68, 97, 177, 183n156 see also fantasy social interaction, 40, 48, 55, 73, 96, 148, 157 see also communication socialization 64–66, 162, 171, 198n24 and individuation 45, 50, 55, 61, 147– 150, 162 solidarity 47, 54–55, 57, 147, 153, 156–157 passim, 171 and responsibility 16, 46 see also anamnesis subject 2 Horkheimer, Max 11 and imaginary 4, 11 transcendental 25–27, 42, 43, 61, 106 see also consciousness, ego subject-object relation 3–4, 22 passim, 63, 139, 165–166, 169 see also non-identity surrealism 123, symbols 5, 48–51, 59–62, 118, 141, 144, 156 gender 164, 171–172 and the imaginary 4, 52, 124–125, 140, 177 Lacanian symbolic 130–139 as meaningless / split-off 80, 83, 89, 102, 117, 149

S Salecl, Renata 179, 208n104 Schelling, Friedrich 128, 134 Scheuerman, William 96, 181n3, 199n33 scientism 64 Schopenhauer, Arthur 22 Searle, John 53 self-reflection 29, 67, 74, 129, 143, 162, 176 as critique 43–44, 50, 54, 85, 89–90, 96 and desire 6 and disenchantment 98 and human interests 9, 43–46, 51, 80–81, 152 and narration 103, 107 as reconstruction 56–57, 103 therapeutic aspects 78

T Taylor, Charles 183n15 transference 100, 105, 109, 115 truth 88, 107 emphatic conception 13, 23–24 passim, 30–31, 34–35 as validity 42, 54–54, 73, 86, 102 Wellmer’s conception 107–113 see also revelation

U understanding explanatory 89 mutual 48, 86–87, 89, 163 see also agreement, communicative action, consensus

Index universalism 137, 191n52 utopian motif 23, 29, 32, 40, 58, 66, 119 passim anticipatory horizon 13, 89–90, 106, 118, 177, 207n96 as critique 31, 55, 85, 89–99, 124–128, 148 and desire 64, 124–128, 136, 139, 179 end of utopia 38 as freedom and reconciliation 53, 60, 86, 177, 181n3 idealism of 78, 87, 89–99, 143 as longing 11, 12, 53, 192n58 as human potential 32, 35–36, 39, 107 utopian fulfillment 46

V validity 42, 57, 67, 87, 100, 102–103, 178

245 claims 54, 91, 98, 111, 145, 163, 172

W Weber, Max 18, 122, 153 Wellmer, Albrecht 9, 107–115 Whitebook 8, 60, 73–74, 76 Habermas, critique of 59–70 Winnicott, Donald 154, 165, 166, 170 work see labor

Y Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 178, 179, 201n77

Z Žižek, Slavoj 3, 130–139, 140, 143, 145, 205n66, 207n96 and Marx, Karl 137

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