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The Reluctant Postmodernism of Jürgen Habermas: Reevaluating Habermas's Debates with Foucault and Derrida

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2022

Peter J. Verovšek Open the ORCID record for Peter J. Verovšek [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Politicians and scholars alike have blamed postmodernism—and the identity politics that have emerged in its wake—for the pathologies of the early twenty-first century. Despite his limited defense of the Enlightenment and his disputes with his French contemporaries, I argue that Habermas's philosophy displays many postmodern characteristics that are often overlooked. These include its decentering of the autonomous subject, its skepticism towards metaphysics, and its rejection of stadial philosophies of history. In light of the fact that Habermas adopts weaker versions of many postmodern commitments, I reconsider his disputes with Foucault and Derrida regarding the legacy of the Enlightenment. I conclude that rather than interpreting Habermas as a conservative critic of his more radical counterparts in France, we should instead see these three thinkers as part of a shared attempt to come to terms with the problems of postwar Europe in a public, discursive manner.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 84 , Issue 3 , Summer 2022 , pp. 397 - 421
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Javier Burdman, Ruth Abbey, and two anonymous reviewers from this journal for their most helpful insights and comments on this paper. Any remaining infelicities are mine alone.

References

1 Tom Rockmore, Habermas on Historical Materialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 166.

2 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 72, 65. For more on the political implications of this critique, see Karppinen, Kari, Moe, Hallvard, and Svensson, Jakob, “Habermas, Mouffe and Political Communication,” Javnost—the Public 15, no. 3 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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28 Ibid., 23.

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44 Michel Foucault, On the Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), 422.

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56 Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves, introduction to Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, 13.

57 Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 145.

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67 Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, 175.

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74 Ibid., 11.

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82 Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 234.

83 Habermas, “Public Space and Political Public Sphere,” 17, 21.

84 Habermas in Claudia Czingon, Aletta Diefenbach, and Victor Kempf, “Moral Universalism at a Time of Political Regression: A Conversation with Jürgen Habermas about the Present and His Life's Work,” Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 7–8 (2020): 13.

85 Jürgen Habermas, “Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of Postmodern Liberalism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 13, no. 1 (2005): 1–28.

86 Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, 126.

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88 Flax, Thinking Fragments, 34.

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98 Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8.

99 Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 282, 185.

100 Jürgen Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019), 1:265.

101 Ibid., 1:14.

102 Jürgen Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” in Habermas and Religion, ed. Craig J. Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 355, emphasis in original.

103 For more on the ways in which religion still “counts” and is “counted on” in the modern world, see Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (Routledge: London, 2002).

104 Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, 1:110. Since the forthcoming English translation was not available at the time of writing, I have translated the quotations from the original German.

105 Ibid., 1:118.

106 Ibid., 2:806 and 2:802, emphasis in original.

107 Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 83–106.

108 Habermas quoted in Foessel and Habermas, Critique and Communication, 3, 4.

109 McCarthy, “Critique of Impure Reason,” 441.

110 Habermas quoted in Foessel and Habermas, Critique and Communication, 4.

111 Johnson, “Romantic and Enlightenment Legacies,” 70.

112 Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, 1:13.

113 Habermas quoted in Foessel and Habermas, Critique and Communication, 4.

114 Jürgen Habermas, “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present: On Foucault's Lecture on Kant's What Is Enlightenment?,” in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 150.

115 Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), 149ff.

116 Fritsch, “Futures of Habermas's Work.”

117 Jürgen Habermas, The Past as Future, trans. Max Pensky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 119.

118 Critchley, “Remarks on Derrida and Habermas,” 456, emphasis in original.

119 Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992).

120 Habermas quoted in Foessel and Habermas, Critique and Communication, 4.

121 Habermas in Czingon, Diefenbach, and Kempf, “Moral Universalism,” 13.

122 For example, Giovanna Borradori, ed., Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

123 Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, “February 15, Or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe,” Constellations 10, no. 3 (2003). See also Verovšek, Peter J., “Meeting Principles and Lifeworlds Halfway: Habermas's Thought on the Future of Europe,” Political Studies 60, no. 2 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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127 Ibid., 62.

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130 Habermas quoted in Boris Frankel and Jürgen Habermas, “Habermas Talking: An Interview,” Theory and Society 1, no. 1 (1974): 53.

131 Ibid.

132 Ibid.

133 Habermas to R. W. Leonhardt (Die Zeit), 16.6.64, Habermas Vorlass, Korrespondenzen 1950er und 1960er Jahre, Folder 5—1964 (A–Z), Johann von Senkenburg Library at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.

134 Foessel and Habermas, Critique and Communication, 4.

135 Theodor W. Adorno, Eingriffe: Neun Kritische Modelle (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 1963), 32.

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137 Foessel and Habermas, Critique and Communication, 4.

138 Johnson, “Romantic and Enlightenment Legacies,” 83.

139 Bourdieu, “Vive le Streit!”