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View Full Version : The Regressive thought of Habermas, Adorno would have turned in his grave.



Asphara
07-27-2010, 12:05 PM
The philosophy of Habermas does not seem to posses a category for emotion, or emotional sociality - for example that captured in the Hegelian and Marxian concern with alienation, Marx's discussion of species being, the critical empathy of Adorno, and the psychoanalytic concern with the fate of instinctual life in Freudian thought. I struggle even to understand how his thought could be regarded as critical theory.

Perhaps emotionality and instinctuality may be lurking in the performative contradiction, or in the depths of his osseous discourse ethics, or possibly sublated into arbitrary system rationality. When you think about what kind of experience of reality is being characterised in this work, in all seriousness, I think we must regard it as psychopathic.

Habermas turned the emotional Adorno upside down, and found that the source of societal ills was the weight of subjectivity on objectivity. Even in Luther’s theology, emotionality was central in the understanding of the human - the sinfull passions of the flesh, and the doctrine of compassion and conscience.

The work of Habermas strikes me as profoundly dissociative - and it emerges in a cultural context of increasingly dissociative subjectivity. In no way can I begin to accept Habermas as a full account of the human - I think it is a profoundly inhuman doctrine, and the mystery is how broadly appreciated it is. It smacks of super-ego to me.

Sebas. Melmoth
07-27-2010, 12:24 PM
Intro is an hilarious example of academic discourse and critical-speak psyco-bable.

Seems the complaint is that Habermas doesn't found his critique on the irrationality of subjective emotion.

Habermas' objective critique of Modernism is 'profoundly dissociative' because he doesn't give primacy to 'emotionality'?!

Uh, lookit: the very basis of the profoundly disturbing societial development known as Modernism is exactly the alienation it exibits from prior tribal and village societies.

Both Adorno and Habermas agree that an oppressive and manipulative discourse is fostered by Modernistic capitalism.

Asphara
07-27-2010, 12:31 PM
Oi, Melmouth, "Both Adorno and Habermas agree that an oppressive and manipulative discourse is fostered by Modernistic capitalism." - Yes, but they were in agreement. The insight into the dissolution of the subject, and the rise of an osseous discursive ethics, is the same insight from two standpoints. One that measures social justice according to "subjective" suffering - i.e. objective suffering - and one which measures social justice by the quietness of this suffering. You haven't even begun an argument that addresses this concern.

Sebas. Melmoth
07-27-2010, 12:45 PM
"Whose '"osseous" discursive ethics' 'measures social justice by the quietness of suffering'?" he wondered while laughing under his breath.

Asphara
07-27-2010, 01:42 PM
By which I meen the measure of Habermasian justice is how quiest suffering is - how far it has been sublated into an ossified disursive ethics.