INTELLECTUALS & THE DIVISION OF LABOR--SARTRE ET AL

[MSalter1@aol.com]

Isn't the point that the critique of reason is not opposed to the unfinished
projexct of enlightenment etc, but reason's own self-critical work. The
problem about the postmod critique is that it is over-totalised and
undermines the very position from which any possible critique must draw
support if some degree of validity is to obtained. The best purchase on the
postmods comes from a comparison with Adorno not Habermas, the former
retained a strong sense of dialectics whereas I have tried to show that the
latter reinstates many of the Kantian and other dualisms that Adorno and in
some measure the deconstructionists have done well to problematise.
Unfortunately the latter have also reinstated and presupposed others to the
point of merely inverting difference/identity, particularity/universality,
reason/non-reason, fiction/truth hierarchies. Ironically it is the critical
theorists who is closest to the post-mods who supplies the best weapons to
use against them, surely a nice instance of dialectical recoil?


Michael Salter
law dept
University of Lancaster
England