From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca> Subject: HAB: Anyone for Habermas on Freud? <fwd> / F. van Gelder Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2000 09:33:51 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time) --Part10012160951.B via my email address... ken --- Begin Forwarded Message --- Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000 22:27:25 +0100 From: "F. van Gelder" <f_van_gelder-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: Anyone for Habermas on Freud? Frederik van Gelder gelder-AT-em.uni-frankfurt.de ----- Original Message ----- From: F. van Gelder To: habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2000 8:25 PM Subject: HAB: Habermas on Freud Anyone on this list interested in a systematic analysis of the relationship Habermas/Freud? In a first step this would involve going through all of the Habermas texts - concentrating, in the main, on everything between *Erkenntnis und Interesse* (EuI) and *Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns* (TdkH) - in which there is mention of the complex Freud/ anthropology/Darwin. The goal of the enterprise - this has to be made explicit at the outset, since otherwise one disappears for ever into the 'historicist' or 'history of ideas' side of it all (or one or other of the countless flames on these things) - is a threefold clarification: 1) at the *methodological* level, the relationship of Critical Theory (CT) to Psychoanalysis (PA); 2) at the *theoretical* level, the relationship of Uebertragung/Gegenuebertragung (transference/ countertrans- ference) in contemporary PA versus the analysis of truth claims in speech act theory; 3) at the *real* (historical) level, the relationship between the forces of Globalisation (globalised Capitalism) on the one hand, the social psychology of contemporary mass movements on the other. As I see it, we would have to start with an analysis of the *methodological*, the *theoretical*, the *political* context in which EuI is written. (To my mind, for *us*, trying to gain clarity on these things, it is essential, in this endless vista of controversies, political confrontations, reading lists too vast to cover in a single lifetime, to hold onto the difference between these three contexts: the methodological, the theoretical, the political. Without such beacons we are, it seems to me, as ordinary mortals with not much more than a PC and a bookshelf at our disposal, simply lost.) I. *Methodologically* EuI seeks to clarify, against the back- ground of Fromm, Marcuse, the *Authoritarian Personality*, the *Dialektik der Aufkl"rung*, the 'Kulturismus' debate, the relationship between CT on the one hand, the individual social sciences - starting with Psychology (PA) - on the other. Habermas, at the time of EuI, shares *neither* the thirties position of Fromm and Horkheimer ('PA is capable of telling us why class consciousness in the Western Democracies failed to develop') *nor* the *Dialectic of Enlightenment* position of Horkheimer and Adorno during the war years in California. ('Enlightenment and Reflection as the basis for a *political* movement - as opposed to the achievement of individual and isolated philosophers - is dead') With Marcuse, he seems to have had the hope that the modern - since 1945 vastly expanded - University system in the West could form something like an equivalent for the selfconscious 'collective historical subject' which *Lukacs* had still discerned in the 'proletariat', but which the realities of Soviet and Eastern Marxism had by then made patently untenable. II. *Theoretically* EuI seeks to clarify the relationship between anthropological universals, their sedimentation 'in' language, ('Knowledge constitutive interests'), and the peculiar experience of 'reflection', in the course of which we, both as concrete individuals and as a species, are capable (touch wood) of reaching a 'higher' degree of individual autonomy and collective freedom. The proof of the *reality* of 'reflection' as a means of gaining *individual* autonomy (which in Habermas' eyes PA had demonstrated beyond any doubt) had a two-fold purpose: a) against the *positivists*, for whom 'objective knowledge' is confined to the results of the natural sciences (maths, stats, experiments) the reality of individual reflective processes is used to prove the inadequacy of formalist explanations of what it is that happens in the course of 'scientific progress'; ('the hypothetico-deductiv method is ideologically biased in favour of purely instrumental reason') b) against *dogmatic Marxism* the reality of individual reflection makes it (i) impossible to ignore the way in which power relationships sediment themselves in ordinary language (which then comes into focus as the place where emancipation at an *individual* level becomes possible); (ii) impossible to 'subsume' everything under the sun under the 'objective contradiction' of 'market' versus 'labour'. (A 'macro-theory' of the species as a whole, as revealed to the party ideologues, according to which every individual experience is nullified by confronting it with a 'class analysis' of the speaker.) In short: for the *positivists* Freud is obscurantist nonsense, a throwback to quasi-religious sectarianism and unprovable metaphysics; for the *Marxists* Freud is a petty- bourgeois intellectual - 'patriarchy' was not yet fashionable as a term of opprobrium - hiding his true class interest in exploitation behind the phony 'universal truths' of Idealism. III. *Politically* EuI is a text written at a time when Germany (and the rest of Europe, plus many other parts of the world) is seeking to come to terms with the legacy of two world wars - and in the middle of a 'Cold War' marked both by the expansion of the 'market mechanism' into all areas of life, and the reality of war in Vietnam and other parts of the 'third' World. In *this* context 'Marx' and 'Freud' give expression to the hope that the contemporary world is - from the perspective of the individual - intelligible at all, that the notion of 'progress' has not been torpedoed for good, ('Spengler', 'Orwell') leaving - if anything - shrinking niches in literature, art, and music for the lucky few. (While the rest of us are left with the choice - if that is what it is - between 'McWorld' and 'Jihad'.) Comments anyone? --- End Forwarded Message --- --Part10012160951.B
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