The future of critical theory between reason and power

Negotiating the dialectic between reason and power

Allen’s contribution to this issue invites us to consider how we might undertake a negotiation of the dialectical relationship between reason and power. Although she does not herself present a response, I will take up her invitation by focusing, in a first stage, on a possible answer presented in Allen’s book The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (2008), which underlines the importance of individual effort.

However, since individual effort is rarely sufficient to overcome deep-seated relations of power, I will supplement Allen’s account, in a second stage, with an account of an additional condition that promises to support the endeavours of individuals, namely, the existence of accommodating relationships and an accommodating culture. I will suggest that we find an answer, of sorts, in the attitudes that enable Habermas and Derrida to transform their initially polemical, combative and reifying relationship into a series of productive and generous encounters. Notably, three ‘civic attitudes’ of openness, humility and resilience allow each party to support the self-articulation of the other person. Consideration of the role of these attitudes in sustaining the endeavours of individuals also provides further reason to support Allen’s presentation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic between reason as both irresolvable and productive. It will be noted that in his encounters with Derrida, Habermas relinquishes his early attempt to dissolve the dialectic in forms of mutual comprehension and, instead, performatively commits to Derrida’s account of the undecidability between reason and power, an interpretation resembling Allen’s. It will be shown that, through this process, Habermas becomes aware of the importance of certain communicative orientations that are not oriented to mutual understanding and which leave him unable to fully rescue reason from the jaws of Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic.

Allen’s response: Creative individual effort

Allen considers the question of how to practise reason through subjection in The Politics of Our Selves (2008) – published with Columbia University Press in an appropriately named series, ‘New Directions in Critical Theory’ – framed by the broader interest in developing a critical theory that is less naive about its ability to transcend relations of power.

For Allen, the answer lies in creative individual effort. Politics of Our Selves presents the self as embedded in the sort of ‘productive tension’ that Adorno and Horkheimer describe, where the work of Foucault and Habermas now represents the two poles that Allen also identifies in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Presenting the individual as both determined and determining, Allen explains that although the self is unable to fully extricate herself from subjecting power relations, the self nonetheless retains her capacity for rational agency (Allen 2008).

Allen takes the example of a young woman and asks after her possibilities for both analysing and transforming her gender domination. She reflects on Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s engagement with female students in her women’s studies classes at Cornell University, which suggests that although these young women could deploy their grasp of feminist theory to critique cultural images of women and femininity, they had nonetheless internalized the contemporary desire for a perfect body (Allen 2008: 181–183; Brumberg 1997: 195–6). However, Allen ultimately parts company with Brumberg because she cannot share Brumberg’s complete dismay over the apparent adherence of these young women to the bodily requirements of normative femininity. Instead, Allen points out that it is possible to accept certain cultural demands while still serving to rework subjection from within. Where Brumberg dismisses her young female students as cultural dopes and passive victims of sexism, despising their continued aspiration to become the next Beyoncé, Allen instead underscores the ways in which the young women nonetheless engage critically with the norms of femininity that have constituted them (2008: 182). For Allen, neither the language of autonomy and choice, on the one hand, or domination and subjugation, on the other, adequately describes the self-expression of these students, complicated by both choice and subjugation.

This envisaging of the possibility of freedom in subjection then requires that Allen provide a way of distinguishing certain choices as better (more rational or more free) than others. Clearly, the entanglement of reason and power does not demand, for Allen, that we relinquish all commitment to the idea of reason’s progress. This is what allows her to affirm her place within the tradition of critical theory, with its concern to ‘liberate’ humans from enslavement (Horkheimer 1982: 244). Allen explains that although all rational choice will be constituted by forms of subordination, choice is better if it not only involves a reflective understanding of the contingencies that have made us who we are, but also the motivational desire to become something else, through our relationships with other people (2008: 183). A self who articulates herself freely in a context of domination will thereby achieve the following.

First, she will work to expand the narrow range of available options so as to include other possibilities. This may involve practising new options in an effort to undo those feelings of guilt, shame and self-berating that would normally drive her to capitulate to her own subjugation. If I understand Allen correctly, this might even involve learning to take pleasure in one’s feeling of subjugation, at least in an initial phase, rather than allowing such feelings to inhibit one’s activities, behaviour and expression. It is Allen’s sensitivity to the different forms such experimentation can take that makes her more sympathetic than Brumberg to the efforts of the young women in Brumberg’s classes.

Second, a young woman must work on transforming her fantasies and desires into forms that involve cooperation between equals, such that her freedom, experimentation and transformation come to be recognized and appreciated as such by others. In this sense, Allen clearly commits to the possibility of mutual recognition in a strongly Hegelian sense, such that the young woman is free when her own projects come to fruition in cooperation with others, rather than in relations of mere subordination. What is striking about this account, however, and what distinguishes it from that of other recognition theorists (including Honneth and Taylor, among others), is that Allen explicitly relinquishes the possibility of ever neatly achieving a state of mutual recognition. Instead, Allen asks us to commit to the project of striving for mutual recognition in the face of its impossibility, using a formulation with strong deconstructive resonances.

As to how to develop a motivational capacity to become someone else, seeking the fruition of one’s projects through cooperation, Allen briefly mentions, in closing, two possible sources for rearticulating the young woman’s self. The first is reflection upon, and experimentation with, ideas that are reflected in collective social movements, including feminist or queer liberation movements, which might allow young women to develop less subordinating modes of attachment (Allen 2008: 183). A second source for transformation is found in the realm of the cultural and social imaginary – literature, film and art – which again motivates a desire to change (Allen 2008: 183–184).

At this point, we need to add an additional element to Allen’s reflections, which tend to present the project of freedom, at least in Politics of Our Selves, as an individual rather than an intersubjective effort. In asking young women to pursue new possibilities, Allen assigns insufficient weight to certain conditions of intersubjective support that make such an endeavour plausible. By this I mean that individual effort is bound to fail without the existence of a second aspect, namely, ‘accommodating relationships’ and an ‘accommodating culture’. ¹ By ‘accommodating relationships’, I mean intersubjective interrelations between two individuals, or within a small group of individuals, where each agent in the relationship sincerely tries – accompanied by the relevant motivational desires – to modify their own projects so as to also facilitate the projects of the other person (and vice versa). This in turn is facilitated by an ‘accommodating culture’, by which I designate institutions and their ability to facilitate ‘accommodating relationships’, since institutional effects on agents can also severely constrain intersubjective possibilities.

Without the existence of accommodating relationships or a culture that welcomes her efforts and that desires her cooperation rather than her subjugation, the young woman will be thwarted at every turn. She will soon find her individual effort too fatiguing and renounce the desired possibilities as simply impossible. This has unfortunately occurred with so many failed social movements, driven into the ground by cultural intransigence. In addition to the creative individual effort Allen identifies, we also need an intersubjective effort (at once inter-individual and institutional) to make possible what was once impossible.

In other words, the young woman’s own attempt will come to little without an effort by others to facilitate her efforts to express her freedom in cooperative ways. Or, to reverse the relation so that it is no longer trapped in the perspective of the self-articulating subject, any commitment to collective emancipation requires that we, as citizens, cultivate certain attitudes that encourage and support the efforts at self-articulation of our fellow citizens. In addition to their own efforts, the young women attending Brumberg’s classes also need their partners, lovers, siblings, parents, grandparents, teachers, legislators, and so on, to modify their own projects in search of relations that allow for her fruitful cooperation rather than her continued subordination. Sometimes, this simply involves accepting and not demeaning the other. In other cases, particularly with respect to her significant peers, encouragement and actual support would be required.

Focusing, in what follows, on accommodating relationships (and leaving to one side, at least in this article, the notion of an accommodating culture), I will suggest that at least three ‘other-oriented’ attitudes on the part of agents are required, complementing the efforts of the more vulnerable self-articulating individual. I will refer to these as ‘deconstructive civic attitudes’, for reasons that will become clear. The first attitude is openness to the Other person, in this case the openness of significant peers towards the young woman in Brumberg’s class and to her effort. The second is humility with respect to the finitude and frailty of one’s own reason, involving the willingness to challenge one’s reason with the reasons of another person, in this case, those of Brumberg’s young woman. And the third might be described as resilience or the effort to keep striving to achieve fruitful cooperation without subordination, in spite of the irreducibility of subjection; the ongoing effort to understand each other in the face of the inevitable misunderstandings that arise in intersubjective exchange.

The cultivation of other-oriented attitudes within accommodating relationships is, in this sense, an important precondition for not frustrating and disappointing the young woman in her efforts. However, such attitudes rarely feature in the work of critical theorists, who tend to prefer reciprocal attitudes such as Rawlsian civility or Habermasian solidarity, where obligations to others are obligations to other selves, already conceptualized as free equals rather than subordinated individuals. And yet other-oriented attitudes regularly feature in our background culture of justice, of which John Rawls speaks, and they remain a resource in the pursuit of the articulation of our selves.

In sum, the practice of reason in subjection has two conditions. The first falls squarely on the shoulders of individuals – the effort of articulating the self. However, the success of this itself depends on the existence of accommodating other-oriented attitudes, facilitating the individual’s endeavour.

An additional element: Other-oriented civic attitudes

Here, I will clarify what I mean by other-oriented civic attitudes by considering the dispositions that enable Derrida and Habermas to transform their initially combative relations into a cooperative and productive pursuit. I refer to such attitudes as ‘deconstructive’, because, although they remain communicative in orientation, they do not seek rational consensus or mutual understanding. And yet, such other-oriented attitudes are needed to facilitate the individual effort at self-articulation that Allen hopes Brumberg’s young women will pursue.

I have three reasons for applying the example of the maturing relationship between Habermas and Derrida to our present case. First of all, the ‘academic war’ of the 1980s that produced antagonistic relations between traditions and countries (Derrida 2006a: 302) appears to be founded on the very divergent interpretations of the use of reason that Allen identifies in her paper. Derrida’s account resembles Allen’s interpretation of the undecidability of the dialectic between reason and power, whereas Habermas seeks the complete dissolution of the dialectic in the achievement of mutual understanding. As Jean-Philippe Deranty (2006) explains in his reading of Derrida’s text Fichus (2005), this is an encounter between Adorno’s ‘natural son’, in the figure of Habermas, and Adorno’s ‘other’ or ‘adopted’ or ‘unnatural’ son, in the figure of Derrida. Habermas qualifies as a ‘natural son’, because he claims to restore the glimmer of hope that he believes Adorno and Horkheimer retain in reason’s capacity to pursue its own critique, thereby supporting the most basic intention of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in seeking forms of mutual understanding through the free exchange of reasons and the force of the better argument (Habermas 1990: ch. 5, 185–90). Habermas believes that the dialectic between reason and power can be resolved once and for all by distinguishing communicative rationality from unilateral forms of power. It is this interpretation that Allen correctly wishes to oppose.

In contrast to Habermas, Derrida presents himself as inheriting an account of the undecidability of the dialectic, mapping onto Allen’s interpretation. In ‘Fichus: Frankfurt address’ (2005), Derrida explicitly situates his own work in relation to Adorno’s, in a presentation to members of the Frankfurt School on the event of his reception of the City of Frankfurt’s Theodor Adorno Prize on 22 September 2001. He claims to follow in the spirit of Adorno’s thinking, but interprets this spirit in quite different terms to Habermas. For Derrida, Adorno provides resources for a divergence with the Habermasian interpretation, resources that Derrida’s deconstruction explicitly inherits in its sensitivity towards the concrete ways in which the determination of the content of justice or the orientation toward mutual understanding fails to achieve its end (Derrida 2002: 248; Bankovsky 2012a). By committing to reason in the face of its failure, Derrida believes that Adorno seeks the ‘possibility of the impossible’, which can only ever be sought after or worked towards in the form of a commitment to something like ‘democracy to come’ (Derrida 2005: 168).

Derrida’s reflections in Fichus, on the relation between wakefulness and dreaming, are drawn from Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of the entanglement of Enlightenment and myth. Where the Enlightenment opposes myth, by attempting to break the spell of inherited authoritarian norms and instead defending reason (or Habermas’ ‘unforced force of the better argument’), Adorno and Horkheimer present Enlightenment as intrinsically related to mythology: ‘Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 8). The mythical spell of authoritarian despotism, which keeps the masses in its sway, is visible in the mysterious willingness of the technologically educated masses to fall prey to consuming the commodity and pursuing the interests of instrumental reason, which means that reason produces blind submission to new forms of barbarism, including aggressive anti-Semitism and rampant attempts to dominate nature (Derrida 2005: 181). Consequently, Adorno and Horkheimer note that although ‘Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters’, it is nonetheless clear that ‘the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity’ (2002: 1). Using language that Derrida inherits, Adorno and Horkheimer claim that this calamity reflects the aporia of Enlightenment – the focus of Allen’s contribution to this issue – such that the pursuit of Enlightenment is at once emancipatory and subjugating.

Derrida’s presentation of his filiation with Adorno exchanges the language of myth for that of the dream, where the imaginations of a sleeping state are opposed to the wakeful and active state of reason (2005: 168). For Derrida, insight does not just derive from the wakefulness of a philosopher, but also from a quite different, but no less responsible, dreaming of poets, writers, essayists, musicians, painters, playwrights and scriptwriters, and even psychoanalysts – those who work within the aporia itself (2005: 166). It is not impossible, Derrida says, to grasp hold of something like the truth or reason of the dream, while one is still asleep. For Derrida, Adorno shares this appreciation for the relationship between dreaming and reason:

I admire and love in Adorno someone who never stopped hesitating between the philosopher’s ‘no’ and the ‘yes, perhaps, sometimes that does happen’ of the poet … In hesitating between the ‘no’ and the ‘yes, sometimes, perhaps’, Adorno was heir to both. He took account of what the concept, even the dialectic, could not conceptualise in the singular event, and he did everything he could to take on the responsibility for this double legacy. (2005: 166)

As Deranty explains, Derrida would no doubt recognize himself in Adorno’s description of Benjamin as both mystic and Enlightenment thinker, someone who attempts to overcome the dream in the wakefulness of reason without, for all that, betraying the dream (Deranty 2006: 424). The possibility of the impossible, the resolution of the dialectic in pure reason, this can only be dreamed; it cannot be achieved in the wakefulness of a finite reason always embedded in relations of power. Allen’s reading of the aporetic nature of Enlightenment is clearly informed by such reflections.

Allen would also share Derrida’s account of the productivity of the aporia. With respect to concrete issues, Derrida’s reading leads him to share Adorno’s concern for what we call the ‘animal’, engaging in a critique of reason’s domination of nature and other living things (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 203; Derrida 2005: 180–1). Adorno blames Kant for not reserving any place in his account of dignity and ‘autonomy’ to relations of compassion or affinity between humanity and animality. The sensitivity, in waking life, towards the concrete ways in which the determination of justice (or Habermasian mutual understanding) produces forms of violence and repression is, in this sense, productive of new and unforeseen insights.

If my first reason for studying the maturing Derrida-Habermas relationship is that it reflects the competing interpretations of the dialectic that Allen lays out, my second reason is that Derrida’s and Habermas’ ability to transform their polemical relationship into a productive engagement provides insight into the sorts of attitudes that facilitate the free articulation of selves, within contexts of power. In their willingness to engage with deep differences and allow the other philosopher to impact upon their own respective projects, Derrida’s and Habermas’ mature encounters come to resemble the sort of relationship with others that Allen hopes Brumberg’s woman will also come to enjoy, where her projects are not dismissed out of hand by her more powerful peers (as per Habermas’ early rejection of deconstruction) but rather sustained in such a way that her particularity indeed comes to impact upon the projects of her peers (as Derrida’s thought comes to influence the later Habermas’ ideas). Moreover, the maturing Derrida-Habermas relationship features not only the creative, individual effort of which Allen speaks, but also the other-oriented attitudes that I have suggested are needed to facilitate such effort. Although each philosopher begins with an individual effort to articulate viewpoints and seek understanding, such effort is not enough to itself secure any change in their understanding of each other. Consequently, individuals also need the other person to bring to the relationship those deconstructive and other-oriented ‘civic attitudes’ that I mentioned earlier, namely, openness, humility and resilience.

I am not suggesting that the two philosophers manage to achieve mutual understanding or full intersubjectively shared reason through such means. Amy Allen is correct to suggest, against Habermas, this is not humanly possible. However, this failure does not prevent each philosopher from pursuing his reason through encountering and listening to the other, in cooperation with the other, modifying their reason with respect to reason in the plurality of its different voices. Such a practice is less subordinating and more rational, even when reason ultimately fails to accommodate plurality, even when reason ultimately misunderstands (Bankovsky 2012a, 2012b; see also Cornell 1991, 1992: 182).

Let me now explain how these other-oriented attitudes allowed Habermas and Derrida to work through their initially combative relationship, producing new insights beyond their respective expectations. We will note that such attitudes are not simply desirable for the sake of cooperation, but rather for the encounters that they facilitate, wherein those involved modify their respective projects, in line with the idea of an ongoing and interminable project of reason.

The Habermas of the 1980s rejects deconstruction outright as representing only the second of the poles of Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic, robbing reason of its emancipatory purpose by reducing reason to rhetorical and emotive persuasion (Habermas 1990: 188). For the early Habermas, Derrida inherits Adorno’s problem without his residual hope. Whereas Adorno supposedly retains his faith in reason’s capacity to perform its own self-critique, performatively confirming reason’s validity by critiquing reason using reason’s own tools, Derrida is relegated, by Habermas, to those ‘black’ writers of the ‘amoral’ bourgeoisie alongside the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche, who not only view the Enlightenment as responsible for its own destruction but also perversely relish reason’s failure. Consequently, Derrida ‘robs’ philosophy of its central duty ‘of solving problems’ (Habermas 1990: 210), instead treating philosophical argument as rhetoric and uncovering the persuasive devices argument uses to convince. In so doing, Derrida negatively avoids the use of reason’s tools, reducing conceptual distinction to a contingent play of force.

For Derrida, Habermas’ analysis is unjust and impatient (Derrida 1988: 156–8; 1989a: 821). Of interest to our purpose is that Derrida’s early response includes the idea that Habermas did not maintain certain other-oriented attitudes, without which the ‘ethics of discussion’ (as Derrida puts it) cannot take place. With respect to the first of what I here refer to as the deconstructive civic attitudes, Habermas appears not to proceed with an open mind, nor does he read Derrida’s texts carefully on their own terms. That is, he does not first listen to the particularity of a thought before projecting his own viewpoint (Derrida 1988: 157–158; 1989b: 59–260; see also Thomassen 2008: 121). ² Instead, Habermas turns to Derrida’s disciples, preferring to repeat platitudes from secondary literature rather than engage carefully with the viewpoint of the other person. As Derrida writes:

Such procedures still surprise me, and I have difficulty believing my eyes, in my incorrigible naiveté, in the confidence that I still have, in spite of everything, in the ethics of discussion (in morality, if not in moralism), in the rules of the academy, of the university, and of publication. (Derrida 1988: 157, emphasis added)

Attempting to grasp the particularity of another’s thought is an important element of any ‘ethics of discussion’, which Habermas unfortunately overlooks.

Moreover, the confidence of the enunciating Habermasian self refuses the sort of humility that accompanies an attitude of openness. The early Habermas does not recognize that his own reason is finite, nor does he yet acknowledge, as he will do in his later work, that his own rational reconstructions of the presuppositions of communication can claim to be nothing more than hypotheses, to be tested anew in ever-changing contexts (Thomassen 2008: 33–4; Bankovsky 2012a: ch. 5). Habermas does not notice that rational consensus is both empirically implausible, as Thomas McCarthy later points out (1993: 181–99), nor does he engage with the conceptual impossibility of his project, which Lasse Thomassen perceptively identifies (2008). And the early Habermas does not yet acknowledge that to the principles of dialogue must be added the procedural requirement that participants agree that their deliberative outcomes are open to contestation, in principle (Thomassen 2008: 33–4). Lacking humility, Habermas simply expresses his views boldly, without entertaining the shadow of a doubt as to whether his interpretation is correct.

Consequently, the early Habermas has no need for what I am referring to as the civic attitude of resilience since he is completely inattentive to his own failures. There is no attempt, on his part, to take responsibility for the imperfections of his theory, which he later begins to acknowledge. On Derrida’s account, an attitude of responsibility for the irreducibility of subordination, subjection and vulnerability in intersubjective exchange, alongside the resilient work to overcome such problems, is essential to a commitment to justice. It is not surprising that the lack of such a virtue fuelled what Derrida has described as a ‘kind of “war”’, not between the two men themselves, but between their supporters (Derrida 2006a: 302). As Derrida explains, these ‘warring’ attitudes also ‘harmed the students who had to form alliances and were then sometimes handicapped in making progress’ (p. 302).

So, in his first reply to Habermas, Derrida turns Habermas’ preferred charge of ‘performative contradiction’ against the man himself, calling on Habermas to acknowledge that he simply does not adhere to the academic and philosophical standards that both men have inherited and to which both are committed (1988: 157, 158; 1989b: 260; Thomassen 2008: 121). Moreover, Derrida asks us to acknowledge – as the mature Habermas will come to concede – that our norms are open to contestation, in principle, which means that he both affirms and denies the rationality of the norms of philosophical argument (Derrida 2006b: 113).

Having shown that the theoretical differences between Derrida and Habermas produced a stalemate exacerbated by a refusal of the civic attitudes of openness, humility and resilience, I now turn to a consideration of the non-deliberative conditions for a cooperative orientation. It is my claim, here, that these performative, other-oriented attitudes support the creative efforts of the individual, to which Allen draws attention. In the case of Habermas and Derrida, such attitudes allow Adorno’s natural and adopted sons to overcome the polemic character of their initial exchange in favour of a productive and generous relationship that nonetheless does not terminate in mutual understanding. The later Habermas commits to these attitudes performatively when setting in motion a ‘congenial and open-minded exchange’ with Derrida, establishing a new practice of interaction (Habermas 2009: 36). He notes, ‘Derrida’s deconstruction, like Adorno’s negative dialectics, is essentially a performative exercise, a Praxis’ (Habermas 2006: 307). It is an attempt to practise, within determined contexts, an outwardly directed and inclusive ethics, which nonetheless itself fails to resolve the dialectic between reason and power. Habermas begins to see the affinities, with his own project, of a practice of ethics that posits the present as an ongoing learning process.

As for the civic attitudes in practice, Derrida recalls that it was the later Habermas’ attitude of openness, the first other-oriented attitude, that marked the onset of their own ‘learning’ (Derrida 2006a: 301), when ‘with a friendly smile’ Habermas approached Derrida and proposed that they have a ‘discussion’ (Derrida 2006a: 302). Without hesitation, Derrida agreed. Habermas, too, recalls that ‘Derrida belongs to those authors who surprise their readers when they meet for the first time. He was not what one expected’ (Habermas 2006: 308). This disposition of openness allows Habermas to welcome the unexpected, learning something new about Derrida: ‘A person of extraordinary kindness, almost elegant, he was certainly vulnerable and sensitive, but had an easy manner and was likeable and friendly, and open to friendship with those he trusted’ (Habermas 2006: 308). This outward gesture of openness, or the willingness to support the efforts at articulation of the other person, then opens a horizon of unheralded possibilities. Derrida explains that ‘in the course of a particularly amicable meal, Habermas, with exemplary decency, for which I will always be grateful to him, did his utmost to get rid of all traces of the former polemics’ (Derrida 2006a: 302).

Habermas then notes, in turn, his deep appreciation of Derrida’s generous attempt to express his intellectual affinity with Adorno and, by extension, with the Frankfurt School, revealing the roots of a performative commitment to critical theory in ‘a gesture [that] does not leave one unmoved’ (Habermas 2009: 35). Against all expectations and in the face of deep differences, this opening allows for unanticipated commonalities: shared hopes for Europe and its future, outrage at the attacks of September 11, critical concern about the reaction of the Bush administration and the majority American opinion, commitment to the Enlightenment and to the Kantian project (Derrida 2006a: 302–303; Derrida and Habermas 2003, 2006; Derrida 2006a: 301; Habermas 2009: 35). It also allows Habermas to recognize certain theoretical crossovers with Derrida: ‘Derrida seems to be still inspired by the memory of the promise of radical democracy. It remains for him a source for the reticent hope in a universal solidarity that permeates all relations’ (Habermas 2008: 277; see also Aubert 2012: 189). In the face of continued differences, the opening itself is now experienced as productive, the exchange itself worthwhile. It is to this productivity of the dialectic that we saw Allen draw attention.

The second deconstructive attitude of humility with respect to the finitude of reason is performatively expressed in the effort of both philosophers to put aside their own convictions about the limits of each other’s projects, admitting to the polemical nature of the initial exchange (Derrida 2006a: 302) and implicitly retracting early errors (Habermas 2006: 308). This humility is also a precondition for a willingness to change, so as to welcome the efforts at self-articulation of the young women in Brumberg’s classes.

Finally, the third deconstructive attitude of resilience is also visible in the mature Derrida-Habermas encounters. Each strives to articulate himself and to arrive at some understanding of the other’s self-articulation and each performatively commits to ‘continuing on such a path’, across their differences. Derrida appreciates the effort Habermas makes to maintain the relationship: ‘Out of exemplary politeness Habermas informs me each time of the answers he has given in interviews’ on their cooperative work (Derrida 2006a: 303). This new beginning sets the ground for meetings in Paris, Frankfurt, and New York, where the two men sustain discussions ‘in a labyrinth, in which [their] philosophical or ethical-philosophical paths crossed now and again, coincided sometimes, and sometimes were in opposite directions’ (Derrida 2006a: 302).

Through this example, we can see that the three civic attitudes I have mentioned are an important component of an answer to Allen’s Foucauldian question about how to express one’s freedom within polemic divides. To recall her question: ‘How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practising a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers?’. Amy Allen is correct to reject the Hegelian resolution of Adorno’s dialectic in the achievement of mutual recognition. That said, although neither Habermas nor Derrida completely achieve their freedom through the projects of the other in the Hegelian sense, the deconstructive attitudes of openness, humility and resilience nonetheless enable both parties to productively express themselves in an interrelationship that is both facilitating and reifying. Although there is no ultimate achievement of mutual understanding through deliberation, the dialectic itself produces unforeseen possibilities. In the Derrida-Habermas relation, we discern a performative acknowledgement of the cooperative importance of the deconstructive attitudes, which promise to leave a trace of the encounter with the unique other person within a shared historical learning process.

Such accommodating attitudes would facilitate the effort of the young women of whom Amy Allen speaks, who require welcoming relationships to support their projects. Without this, and in spite of their best intentions, it is unlikely that their creative individual efforts will allow them to develop cooperative rather than subordinating relationships with others in their lifeworld. These civic attitudes, in my view, express the intersubjective nature of the performative effort to achieve freedom in subjection, which Amy Allen correctly defines as the goal of critical theory.

The future of critical theory: Concluding reflections

Allen’s paper opens up a second question, concerning the future of critical theory in a post-Habermasian phase, now that its goal has been redefined as the orientation towards freedom in subjection, or the proper use of a reason that is inextricable from relations of power. Allen encourages us to recognize that our practice of critique is itself open to revision, and she suggests that we view the inevitable failures of located critique as the source for further criticism, in an ongoing process, the mark of our human condition.

Supporting Allen’s view, I will close by considering some resources that might allow critical theory to elaborate itself while retaining a critical perspective with respect to its own stakes. Contesting Habermas’ early critique of the 1980s, which professed to defend reason from its radical critique by the French thinkers (Habermas 1990), I suggest that we can discern the contours of an emerging style of such a critical theory, strongly influenced by the contemporary French tradition. Indeed, working between Foucault and Habermas, Amy Allen’s 2008 book Politics of Our Selves adds critical mass to the work of a number of thinkers also interested in the insights of French theory for the pursuit of a self-reflexive form of critical theory. So, what character might this form of post-Habermasian critical theory take?

In her contribution to this issue, Allen herself suggests that critical theory will need to relinquish the strong commitment to the linear account of historical progress that drives Habermas’ critical theory, which cannot easily provide the basis for a critique of imperialism and colonialization. Habermas’ concept of progress implies that inheritors of the project of European modernity are more advanced and developmentally mature than their colonized, non-European counterparts, and Allen instead suggests that theory will need to account for norms without reference to a development account of the end of history.

Drawing on work I have pursued elsewhere with Alice Le Goff (2012), I will now indicate further avenues for developing critical theory in its post-Habermasian phase, each of which are rooted in the contemporary French tradition. Alongside the maturing Habermas-Derrida relation, one notices a growing global interest, in the last two decades, in the forgotten resources of contemporary French philosophy for a critique of power and domination, with a coalescing of different viewpoints around at least four key characteristics. ³

First, post-Habermasian theory will need to be more attentive to the agonistic manner in which identity construction proceeds, taking more seriously the idea that the orientation towards mutual understanding is both facilitative and reifying. I already noted, earlier in this paper, that Allen’s 2008 book clearly situates critical theory in this light, exploring the ways that the young women in Brumberg’s classes might pursue freedom in subjection. Similar ideas have productively been developed elsewhere by Lois McNay (2008, 2012), Judith Butler (2008), David Owen (2012), James Tully (2008), Andrew Schaap (2004), Patchen Markell (2003), Alice Le Goff (2012) and a number of others.

Second, post-Habermasian critical theory will need to avoid limiting itself to the exchange of reasons through language, where the force of the better argument alone holds sway. Instead, critical theory must be more attentive to pre-linguistic processes, which produce reason as embodied and material. Drawing on French phenomenology, Axel Honneth points out that Habermas’ focus on language prevents him from noticing the moral importance of non-linguistic experiences of disrespect, humiliation and social shame, which, often inchoate and deeply personal, seldom receive airing in the public language of shared, general interests, producing pathologies in intersubjective relationships (Honneth and Bankovsky 2012; Deranty 2009; Garrau 2012).

Third, and a consequence of the second point, critical theory in a post-Habermasian phase must take more seriously structural factors of domination. Nuanced accounts of power and structure provided by French social theorists, like Bourdieu and Boltanski, provide resources for questioning the assumption, among Habermasian theorists, that subjugated subjects will automatically enter into conflict when denied sustaining forms of recognition (Lazzeri 2012; Celikates 2012). Since this is not the case, a more nuanced approach would also account for those factors that inhibit and frustrate marginalized subjects, preventing them from even wanting to engage in conflict over unjust norms.

Finally, post-Habermasian critical theory might also engage with the idea, strong in the tradition of contemporary French philosophy, of avoiding a pre-determination of the possible in advance. As I mentioned at the outset, where critical theorists like Rawls assign a role of ‘reconciliation’ to political philosophy, assisting us to see the supposed rationality of our social world so as to work toward a ‘realistic utopia’ (2001: 3–4), Allen’s account of the irresolvability of the dialectic between reason and power encourages us to resist characterizing critical theory in terms of taming emancipatory hopes and interests. This insight has been developed elsewhere by Paul Patton (2007, 2010), who draws on French philosophy to underscore the future-oriented direction of theories of justice, and also by Drucilla Cornell, who refuses to limit the role of political philosophy to ‘reconciliation’ with current structures and instead underlines the transformatory potential of the tension between reason and power. For Cornell, this tension provokes us to transform instituted or generally accepted forms of justice in view of as yet unimaginable possibilities, producing an account of justice that is ‘more utopian’ than Rawls’ ‘realistic utopia’ (Cornell 1992: 182; see also Bankovsky 2012a, 2012b, 2014).

Interestingly, these four characteristics of a post-Habermasian phase of critical theory are also discernable in the changing character of French philosophy and social theory within France itself. Mirroring the efforts of Habermas and Derrida, we have seen the resumption of strong forms of intellectual cooperation across French-German borders, in a spirit of cooperative respect for the differences of each tradition. With Alice Le Goff, I suggest that we are beginning to see the outlines of a new style of French political philosophy, with philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and economists increasingly working together to explore the intersection between Habermasian consensus, the theory of recognition, and the sociology of gift-giving in the tradition of Marcel Mauss, and through the work of European intellectuals associated with Le Mouvement anti-utilitariste en sciences sociales (Bankovsky and Le Goff 2012).

To close, Amy Allen’s remarkable reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment constitutes a timely reminder of the need to pay closer attention to the concrete ways in which our practice of reason remains embedded in relations of power. The strength of her interpretation lies in the commitment to reason that nonetheless drives her analysis. Clearly, Allen believes that underscoring the entanglement of reason and power need not undermine our commitment to reason. Consequently, we are asked to view the descent into barbarism and the violence of colonialism that marks the development of the dialectic in the history of the West as historically contingent, an incentive to work all the harder to respond to our inevitable failure to achieve rational institutions. This, she correctly suggests, is the challenge of our times. We are fortunately committed, as Foucault puts it, to practising a rationality that cannot be neatly abstracted from relations of power, and Allen reminds us that the onus now lies with us and our commitment to working for a better world. The manner in which we undertake this practice will set the tone of ‘the times of our lives’. ⁴