Date: Fri, 14 Nov 1997 22:27:22 EET+200
Subject: MT: Habermas & Adorno's dead-end?


Greetings

I have a problem, and I don't even know why I don't grasp one passage 
in Peter Dews' essay "Modernity, Self-Consciousness and the Scope of 
Philosophy: Juergen Habermas and Dieter Henrich in Debate" (in "The 
Limits of Disenchantment. Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy" 
(Verso 1995)). Perhaps it's the (for me too tough) content, or the 
fact I don't know Habermas' program very well, or perhaps it has to 
do just with the syntax. Dews writes (p. 173): 

" Significantly, in the little-read closing pages of the first volume 
of *The Theory of Communicative Action*, Habermas feels obliged to 
address Henrich's account of self-consciousness and self-preservation 
in detail. In terms of general structure of Habermas's philosophical 
position, this need arises because he must definitively establish the 
'exhaustion' of the paradigm of *Subjektphilosophie*, suggested by 
the dead-end of Adorno's *Negative Dialectics*, before moving on to 
expound his communicative grounding of a critical social theory. " 

This is by no means a crucial passage for Dews' argument, but it sure 
bothers me that I don't grasp all the issues involved in it. 

Does anyone knows what Dews is talking about? Is Adorno's Neg. Dial. 
(or in it) a 'dead-end'? 

Yours, Jukka L