From: MSalter1-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 03:19:44 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: HAB: Habermas and Social Action


three points Re the debate over habermas and pomo

1/. The "conservatism" of pomo is questionable, given that aspects of pomo
degenerate into an "anything goes" relativism with potentially nihilistic
implications for the very value of respect for difference that it seems to
want to promote, particularly in the sphere of civil liberties and rights
where the difference of torturers is levelled down to that of their victims -
both are equally "other"/"different" etc.

2/. Habermas one-sided polemic needs perhaps to be read in conjunction with
his critique of the Nietzchean dimension of Carl Schmitt - the fascist legal
and constitutional theorists who also ontologised "will to power" and
resulting friend/foe dualism into an eternal given. Foucault is also guilty
of ontologising power/resistance as an enternal fact of life in places. I
would agree that Habermas's usual hermeneutical openness goes astry in his
polemic in PDM, and that whilst he attempts an immanent criticism - so much
of remains external and presupposes the validity of his own
contextualism/universalism dualism, when this is preicsely what is at stake.

3/. In my own critique of the pomo approach to civil rights I found that I
could make a better critical theory case from Gillian Rose's "dialectic of
nihilism" 1984, Peter Dews "Logics of Disintegration" and Adorno's various
critiques of Heidegger, e.g., Negative Dialectics and Jargon of Authenticity
(relevant esp re Derrida).


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