Date: 	Wed, 26 Mar 1997 12:50:00 -0500
From: "kenneth.mackendrick" <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: Habermas and Social Action



i think this is good clarification!!!  does anyone have any critical thoughts on 
habermas's new book - between facts and norms?  i'm especially wondering about 
his idea of citizenship.  i'm struggling with his distinction between the public and 
private sphere, justification and application, and citizenship and democracy.  its 
not that i don't understand what he is saying - it just doesn't sit well with me and i 
can't completely figure out why.  why citizenship and not human rights?  it seems 
to me that citizenship poses an exclusive club membership that human rights 
might avoid.  i'm anticipating here objections raised by theorists like agnes heller 
and seyla benhabib.  thoughts?

ken

> 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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