From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca> Subject: Re: HAB: Thinking beyond the old Gadamer-Habermas debate Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 18:54:08 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time) On Mon, 19 Feb 2001 15:11:26 -0800 (PST) Gary D <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com> wrote: > Though this is overtly a response to Martin's 19 Feb #61, "Re: HAB: > re: conceptual thinking (concept vs. notion)," I want this to express > my belief that the Habermas-Gadamer debate is outstripped by the > frames of mind expressed by Habermas' developmentalism of and after > the mid-70s. That might be true enough, but it is worth thinking about, especially for those of us still learning the contours of the distinction between hermeneutics and critical theory... Habermas still maintains that hermeneutics is fundamentally limited from within... and hermeneuticists' still maintain that critical theory is a dangerous utopia (interestingly... in BFN Habermas turns Gadamer's old critique, about critical theory upholding an anarchist utopia into a positive, mentioning that there is an anarchistic core to communicative freedom). Anyway... what I find to be fascinating is that in most of the secondary literature on the Gadamer-Habermas debate, there is *no* mention of Freud at all (despite the fact that a substantial portion of Habermas's article on the universality of hermeneutics is devoted to his reading of psychoanalysis!). In the 10-15 articles I flipped through psychoanalysis was mentioned only twice, and Freud's name only once - and that was in a quote from Habermas. This historical curiousity, it seems to me, indicates that thinkers will go to great lengths to avoid talking about the unconscious, which was Freud's point! and it also goes to show that Habermas's disavowal of psychoanalysis the introduction to Theory and Practice was given enough of a priviledged place to stiffle any further inquiry into the matter. My hypothesis here is that Habermas's reading of psychoanalysis was the problem, not Freudian psychoanalysis which offers up a great deal to theories of communication. And I think critical theory, of the Habermasian sort, stands to benefit a great deal from a further engagement with Freud, and, of course, Lacan (which is my interest). And to -start- this discussion my hunch is that one must be either an orthodox Habermasian reading Lacan, or an orthodox Lacanian reading Habermas. I've opted for the latter. The think is, a Lacanian intervention forecloses the direction Habermas moves in, even if he elaborates it well, so in this regard his earlier work is more fruitful to work with (aside from that, I'm working with a relatively small and temporally limited portion of Habermas's overall work, although I'm trying to be mindful of his own self-interpretation). ken ps. sorry about the post yesterday, my response was in haste... i should have specified a dogmatic dependence on 'tradition' not language! --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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