[FRA:] Reason (correction!)

[matthew piscioneri]

This is what happens when you try to work from memory on a Monday morning 
:-). The following quotes are from interviews with Habermas collated in 
_Autonomy & Solidarity_ apologies for the confusion.

The framing statements are mine from my dissertation on Habermas _The Myth 
of Reason_ (2004), which can be accessed on Gary's Habermas, Yahoo Groups 
site if anyone be interested.


Habermas insists that Horkheimer and Adorno’s counter-Enlightenment critique 
takes place still within the broad theoretical framework of the 
Enlightenment: ‘Even in the Dialectic of Enlightenment the impulse of the 
Enlightenment is not betrayed’ (1992: 222). In another interview Habermas 
states his position more directly:

"At no point does Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique of reason darken to a 
renunciation of what the great philosophical tradition, and in particular 
the Enlightenment once intended, however vainly, by the concept of reason." 
(1992: 152)

However, Habermas’s preferential treatment of Horkheimer and Adorno is best 
exposed by the sharpness of the tone he reserves for his discussion of 
Nietzsche’s work and that of Nietzsche’s post-structuralist “disciples” 
Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. There is no saving grace or sign of 
forgiveness extended either to Nietzsche, Foucault or Derrida:

"What separates him [Adorno] from these two figures [Derrida and Foucault] 
as from Nietzsche himself – and this seems to be politically decisive 
[emphases mine] – is simply this: Adorno does not merely bale out of the 
counter-discourse which has inhabited modernity ever since the beginning; 
rather, in his desperate adherence to the procedure of determinate negation, 
he remains true to the idea that there is no cure for the wounds of 
Enlightenment other than the radicalized Enlightenment itself."(1992: 155)

regards,

mattP