On the logic of the performative contradiction: Habermas and the radical critique of reason

Review of Politics

Volumn 58, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 735-760

  Morris, Martin ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 10844267556     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500020441     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. For a survey collection of recent work on the radical critique of traditional philosophical endeavor and proposals for its transformation, see Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman and Thomas McCarthy, eds. After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1987).
2. For a recent and comprehensive historical treatment of the Frankfurt School, see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1994).
3. Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John dimming (New York: Continuum, 1972 [1947]).
4. Martin Jay, "The Debate over Performative Contradiction: Habermas versus the Poststructuralists," in Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, ed. A. Honneth, T. McCarthy, C. Offe and A. Wellmer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 261-279
5. Knodt has recently examined performative contradiction from the perspective of systems theory in an article that complements the argument presented here. Eva Knodt, "Toward a Non-Foundationalist Epistemology: the Habermas/Luhmann Controversy Revisited," New German Critique 61 (1994): 77-100.
6. For example, a radical critique of reason purporting to show that there exist no theoretical or philosophical "foundations" that can secure the "rationality" of reason beyond its historical, and therefore particular embodiment, nevertheless performs a "rational" critique by doing so and hence is said to involve a "performative" contradiction of inconsistency.
7. Jiirgen Habermas, "Theodor Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity-Self-Affirmation Gone Wild," in Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983 [1969]), p. 106.
8. See Thomas McCarthy, "Rationality and Relativism: Habermas's 'Overcoming' of Hermeneutics," in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. J. B. Thompson and D. Held (London: Macmillan, 1982).
9. Jay, "Debate over Performative Contradiction," pp. 264-265,267
10. In his recent work Habermas has described this change of theory as a paradigm shift from what he describes as the "philosophy of consciousness" to that of linguistic philosophy or, more accurately, the theory of communicative action. An adequate consideration of this large topic is outside the present focus.
11. See K-O. Apel, "The Problem of Philosophical Foundations in Light of a Transcendental Pragmatics of Language,"
12. in Baynes et al., After Philosophy, pp. 250-290, p. 276ff.
13. Ibid; Baynes et al. After Philosophy 250-290
14. and Apel, "Is the Ethics of the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On the Relationship between Ethics, Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia," in The Communicative Ethics Controversy, ed. S. Benhabib and F. Dallmayr (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 23-59.
15. Jurgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1990), pp. 80-81.
16. Ibid, Jurgen Habermas Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action pp. 93-94;
17. for Habermas's explicit criticism of Apel, see pp. 95-96.
18. The more emphatic distinction between the German uberzeugen and Uberreden compared to that between "convince of" and "talk into" is mentioned in a translation note to Moral Consciousness.
19. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, pp. 88,90.
20. Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Vol.1, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1984 [1981]), p. 302.
21. Habermas's social theory, while in some ways reminiscent of Rousseau, is nevertheless opposed to and distinct from the latter in important and essential ways. See J. M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jtirgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1995), chapter 4.
22. Habermas, Moral Consciousness, pp. 202-203.
23. Ibid, Habermas Moral Consciousness p. 100.
24. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1, p. 366.
25. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederic G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1987), p. 118.
26. Ibid, pp. 118, 68-69.
27. Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jiirgen Habermas (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 108.
28. Yet this is a characterization that is mentioned and tacitly accepted by Jay in his essay and by others sympathetic to Habermas's critique of Adorno. See Jay, "Debate over Performative Contradiction," p. 263
29. and Seyla Benhabib's critique of Adorno in her Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 169.
30. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 27. Translation altered.
31. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1, p. 379 (emphasis added).
32. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973 [1966]), p. 177. Translation altered.
33. Ibid, T. W. Adorno Negative Dialectics p. 146. Translation altered.
34. Theodor W. Adorno, "Zum Verhaltnis vom Soziologie und Psychologie," in Gesammelte Schriften 8, p. 51.
35. Adorno, Negatixx Dialectics, pp. 33-34. Translation altered.
36. Ibid, Adorno Negatixx Dialectics p. 11. Translation altered.
37. Ibid, p. 163.
38. Theodor W. Adorno, "Introduction," in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 27.
39. A psychoanalytic dimension is in the background of Adorno's critical theory. But as an indication of Adorno's unwillingness to define substantively repressed subjectivity, he limits himself to references to a "life-force" [Lebendige] or just to plain "life" in many cases.
40. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 15. Translation altered.
41. Jay Bernstein, "Art Against Enlightenment: Adorno's Critique of Habermas," in The Problems of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 55.
42. This claim by Habermas is of course very contentious, since for some avowed post-Nietzscheans like Connolly and Connolly's Foucault, developing a "constructive theory" (distinguished from merely a "deconstructive theory") is in fact a centrally important task. See William E. Connolly, Identity \ Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 57-63.
43. Jiirgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jilrgen Habermas (London: Verso, 1986), p. 156.
44. See Jiirgen Habermas, "Philosophy as Stand-in and Interpreter," in Moral Consciousness, pp. 1-20.
45. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1, p. 317.
46. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 35-36. Translation altered.
47. Ibid, Adorno Negative Dialectics p. 149. Translation altered.
48. Ibid.,
49. Ibid, p. 241.
50. "The process in which the individual becomes independent, the function of exchange society, terminates in the abolition of the individual through integration. What produced freedom changes into unfreedom. . . . On the other hand, in the age of universal social oppression the image of freedom against society lives only in the features of the mistreated or crushed individual. . . . Freedom becomes concrete in the changing forms of repression: in resistance to these forms" (ibid, pp. 262, 265). Translation altered.
51. Fred R. Dallmayr, "Appendix: Lifeworld and Communicative Action," in Polis and Praxis: Exercises in Contemporary Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1984), p. 239.
52. Adorno's concept of "nonidentical subjectivity" is at odds with the Habermasian "intersubjective" subjectivity, despite the latter's quite clear difference to the traditional notion of constitutive subjectivity. Perhaps most importantly, the difference of Adorno's concept has to do with the absence of the need to refer in his theory to the idea of the "ideal communication community Honneth has extended the Habermasian concept of intersubjectivity in directions that clearly delineate it from traditional notions, but do not essentially change its dependence on the linguistically-mediated claims of communicative action, that is, on the need for recognition such claims raise. See Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).
53. Adomo, Negative Dialectics, p. 185.