tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314448479497631270.post3636388742004460711..comments2023-04-14T15:49:59.069+03:00Comments on Torn Halves: Habermas's ShoesTorn Halveshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05484735405128600839noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314448479497631270.post-82014804098060613722008-12-28T22:15:00.000+02:002008-12-28T22:15:00.000+02:00Werther, thanks for the feedback. Two nice points ...Werther, thanks for the feedback. Two nice points (which seem to be two versions of the same point). My first fumbling reaction is this: Of course no theory - and no anti-theory, assuming we have a problem with Theory with a capital 'T', which is what I guess Habermas was up to - can reach beyond itself, grab the things themselves and paste them onto the page, but (prima facie) there seems to be something dubious about this apriori theoretical legislation of the proper bounds of theory. As I said, I warm a great deal to Adorno's making theory (or non-Theory) depend on experience and the ability to make sense of a historical experience, and it seems to me that if someone claims to have come up with the definitive formulation of Critical Theory or Moral Theory or something which is supposed to give a definitive orientation to a drifting (post-) modernity, and if it cannot make sense - if it cannot affirm - such paradigmatic acts of critical practice as shoe throwing in Iraq or other anti-imperialist gestures, then it is false. <BR/><BR/>Habermas seems to affirm a universality (the universality constitutive of a modern democratic discourse) at the expense of particularity (the particularities of communities, traditions, histories, environments, pleasure, etc). Here are THE torn halves. What I got from Adorno was the importance of putting this fragmentation at the centre of our (critical) thinking, and seeing it as the problem (a problem with the fundamental categories of modernity). If critical theory then insists on only one of the torn halves and says that the other is simply something that must be passed over in silence (by theory, at least), then critical theory really has lost its way.<BR/>But this is just fumbling.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5314448479497631270.post-11993435166675078542008-12-24T22:29:00.000+02:002008-12-24T22:29:00.000+02:00Two things: Habermas has a passage in Moral Consci...Two things: Habermas has a passage in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action where he brackets off all of these kinds of situations, basically conceding that they lie outside the realm of his theory, which I will quote for you when I have time to find it; and Edward Said once picked up on a statement Habermas made in an interview, roughly: "Critical theory has nothing to say to anti-imperial struggles in the Third World."Lucienhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06991287827933849844noreply@blogger.com