Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 00:05:06 +1000
Subject: Re: HAB: RE: habermas and brandom


G'day Ken,

I'm way behind, here, but you write:

>Wellmer, in Endgames, provides a provocative
>rejoinder to Habemas in his essay on hermeneutics, truth and meaning; wherein
>meaning is noted to be "nonobjectively present." From a psychoanalytic
>perspective, this "nonobjective presence" is, in truth, an "objective
>absence"
>(not to be confused with a Derridean deferral). It seems to me, then, that a
>theory of imagination becomes extraordinarily important for understanding the
>interaction between language, communication and the unconscious. However,
>Habermas has somewhat closed this route in his reading of Freud (which is
>based
>on his reading of Hegel's Jena lectures) - wherein he argues that the
>unconscious is a derivative of public communication (thus, the imaginary is a
>derivative of the symbolic). My suspicion is that the imaginary and the
>symbolic must be grasped as dialectically constituting - and this has been
>most
>fruitfully developed in the work of Castoriadis and the "new" Lacanians. I
>should also mention the relevance of Honneth's reading of Hegel's struggle
>for
>recognition in his book of the same name.

Well, we needn't read "nonobjectively present" as "objectively absent", so,
thankfully, we don't have to conclude that meaning can not exist.  What is
the point of coming up with this autonomous category of 'imaginary'?
Perhaps I misunderstand you, but we do not imagine with the things and
events we are imagining, so with what do we imagine?  Or are you heroically
defending the (logically presocial) autonomous subject here?

Or am I imagining it?

I get so confused ...
Rob.



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