Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 07:41:11 -0800
Subject: Re: HAB: Adorno & Habermas


At 09:43 AM 11/5/01 +0000, you wrote:
>Dear List,
>
>I realise this may be old hat to many on the List, but I am seeking 
>participants in a dialogue about the development of Habermas's reaction 
>to/reconstruction of Adorno's work in particular; although this will 
>necessarily broach Horkheimer's co-authorship of the _DoE_.

Count me in.

>The thesis I am trying to explicate is that a shift occurred between  JH's 
>theoretical relationship to Adorno's (and Horkheimer's) work between the 
>1960s and 1970s (more reconstructive and continuous) to the more 
>rhetorical stance (irruptive) introduced in the _TCA_ and especially in 
>the _Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_.

I wouldn't characterize Habermas's TCA and PDM as rhetorical... (after all, 
TCA is an expanded reworking of Legitimation Crisis and PDM is a 
philosophical extension of CES) but, there is a transition within 
Habermas's work after KHI. It is less a thematic transition and more the 
way Habermas seeks to justify his project, expanding it in several 
directions and re-contextualizing some ideas within a broader 
inter-theoretical frame. One of the key shifts, I think, pertains to his 
shift from an cultural-anthropological understanding of human interest to a 
formal pragmatic argument. The question that looms largest here is the 
status of the idea of emancipation.

With regards to Habermas's relationship with Adorno, Robert Hullot-Kentor 
has speculated that there is some sort of Oedipal rivalry going on, 
although that might be a biographical insight irrelevant to the theoretical 
issues at stake.

Hullot-Kentor, Robert
      1989       "Back to Adorno" Telos 81, 5-29.
     1992        "Notes on Dialectic of Enlightenment: Translating the 
Odysseus Essay" New German Critique 56, 101-108.

The transition has also been discussed by Martin Morris in his excellent 
book Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas, and the Problem 
of Communicative Freedom (2001).

ken



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