9 - Foucault and Habermas on the subject of reason

Summary

But truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.

Michel Foucault

Foucault's last attempt to situate his life's work in the Enlightenment tradition presumably laid to rest any lingering doubts about the rational basis of his work. Yet, Habermas and his sympathizers remained skeptical. The rational subject, they argued, was never adequately accounted for in Foucault's work.

Explanation for this discrepancy must be sought in Foucault's original disenchantment with the Enlightenment project – above all, his critique of modern humanism and the kind of subjectivity it entails. For the purposes of this essay, it will suffice to broach this topic by contrasting Foucault's critical method with the critique of ideology undertaken by members of the Frankfurt School (Part I). As we shall see, Foucault's critical method is more radical than theirs in that it brackets the emancipatory ideals underwriting reason itself. Stronger still, it allegedly shows the impossibility of the Hegelian categories of reflection in which these ideals are cast.

I shall argue that these categories are not as paradoxical as Foucault thinks. Indeed, I shall show that, mutatis mutandis, they inform the very hermeneutic circle in which he himself reformulated his understanding of the rational, self-empowering subject. The road leading to this conclusion must pass through the difficult terrain staked out by Habermas's theory of communicative action (Part II). The latter ostensibly redeems reason from its paradoxes while simultaneously demonstrating the self-referential contradictions attending its wholesale rejection.