Ulysses’ reason, nobody's fault: Reason, subjectivity and the critique of Enlightenment

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 26, Issue 6, 2000, Pages 47-59

  Papastephanou, Marianna ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS   (Cyprus)

Author keywords

Adorno; alienation; critique; culture; Enlightenment; Freud; Habermas; Horkheimer; Luk cs; Marcuse; paradox of reason; reason; self preservation; subjectivity

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992884518     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370002600603     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso Press, 1979), p. 28 27.
2. Theodor Adorno, ‘Theorie der Halbbildung’, in Adorno, Soziologische Schriften I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972).
3. Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 6.
4. See A. Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetic, Ethics, and Postmodernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
5. On this point, see Martin Jay, ‘The Debate over Performative Contradiction’, in Axel Honneth et al. (eds) Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
6. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991) (henceforth TCA 1), p. 379 366.
7. Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 83.
8. In Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, quoted by Habermas in TCA 1, p. 368.
9. Joel Whitebook, ‘Fantasy and Critique: Some Thoughts on Freud and the Frankfurt School’, in David Rasmussen (ed.) Handbook of Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 291 293.
10. See further, Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 171–2.
11. Habermas, TCA 1, p. 393.
12. Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 48 54 67 17 33.
13. Whitebook, ‘From Schönberg to Odysseus: Aesthetic, Psychic, and Social Synthesis in Adorno and Wellmer’, New German Critique 58 (1993): 45–64 (51).
14. On Jean-François Lyotard's account of the sublime, see Lyotard, The Inhuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
15. See Hauke Brunkhorst, ‘Adorno, Heidegger, and Postmodernity’, in D. Rasmussen (ed.) Universalism vs Communitarianism: Contemporary Debates in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 193. In this paper, Brunkhorst (implicitly in contrast to Habermas's and Wellmer's interpretations of Adorno's idea of reason) gleans moments of reclaiming a ‘healthy’ rationality in Adorno's thought without having recourse to a non-available mystical element. He develops the idea of ‘rational identity’, traces of which are found mainly in Adorno's Negative Dialectics. In my view, although this definitely marks out the crucial differences in perspective between Adorno on the one hand and Nietzsche and Heidegger on the other, it still operates ‘under the spell’ of an occidental-metaphysical understanding of human nature. Brunkhorst's concession that ‘for all his critique of independent instrumental rationality, Adorno was convinced that a rationality without an element of self-preservation was not rationality’ (p. 192) is very telling.
16. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 108.
17. Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment, p. 27.
18. Immanuel Kant, in Hans Reiss (ed.) Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 45.
19. For more on Kant's idea of universal history and the way I connect it with antagonism and self-preservation, see Marianna Papastephanou, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Human Nature’, CD Rom, MIT Press, Proceedings of the 6th ISSEI Conference at Haifa (forthcoming).
20. Kant, The Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 1987).
21. Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 94.