ADORNO ONE LAST TIME

[kenneth.mackendrick@utoronto.ca]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2000 15:23:29 -0500 Ralph Dumain <rdumain@igc.org> wrote:

> And I'm thinking maybe I should read Honneth's THE STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION.  

If you aren't very persuaded by Habermas, then you probably won't be impressed 
by Honneth's work either. I'm not sure if you are a fan of psychoanalysis or 
not... but Honneth 'reads' Habermas with the work of Jessica Benjamin in some 
parts (The Bonds of Love).  I think Benjamin's work is excellent and it 
provides quite an alternative, if taken seriously, to Habermas's appropriation 
of Freud - something I'm not sure Honneth has taken seriously enough.  I'd 
recommend Tod Sloan's book Damaged Life as an interesting substitute to Honneth.

I'd also highly recommend looking at Zizek's introductory essay (if you haven't 
already) in the anthology Mapping Ideology, ed. Zizek - he's got a critique of 
Adorno and Habermas that might be of interest (from a distinctly 
Althusserian-Hegelian-Lacanian perspective).  I find there are interesting 
similarities between Adorno and Lacan in many ways... but I've found that the 
intersections have largely been left unexplored... I'm not quite sure why.

By way of a footnote - what disturbed me most in Habermas was his purely 
linguistic formulation of subjectivity - and I was interested in exploring 
something more... sensual or "emphatic" in the FS sense.  I found Castoriadis's 
notion of the imaginary quite helpful.  I eventually figured out he was drawing 
on Lacan - when someone put me in touch with Zizek's work.  I had formerly been 
working with the FS's conception of emphatic reason, but I've since found that 
the idea of the imaginary has been far more useful in exploring and examining 
contemporary ideology.

ken