File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2001/habermas.0102, message 63


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!



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