Interview with Robert Gordon (Ph.D., Columbia). Discussed topics include his academic career in philosophy and views on the simulation theory of mind.

Would Habermas’s “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment” pass muster as coursework in a class on Dialectic of Enlightenment? Using this polemical thought experiment setup as an estrangement device, I critically discuss Habermas’s essay that was pivotal in his repositioning of Critical Theory in the 1980s. I argue that it is philosophically and biographically unreflective; and that he is engaging in underhanded politicking. I sketch an alternative reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment: instead of viewing it as the dead end that (...) Habermas presents it to be, we can see as a self-therapeutical exercise in destabilizing a complacent self-conception whereby modernity is the pinnacle of moral progress—an exercise which might have a certain exemplarity for others in the ongoing quest of making use of our own understanding. The contribution is rounded off with a postscript by a second assessor of Habermas’s essay, discussing both the proposed assessment and the polemical thought experiment. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article articulates the idea of a disclosing critique of society. It starts from the assumption that the curiously organicistic undertones of Adorno’s negative social ontology is part and parcel of a disclosing gesture in his social criticism. It then traces Adorno’s debate with social organicists to the point where the critical theorist’s own concept of society emerges with a claim to be critical in itself. It is argued that this critical claim is enforced by a disclosing gesture. To (...) articulate what is at stake in this gesture of critical disclosure a parallel is drawn, and contrast made, to Emerson’s conception of disclosure as “drawing a circle around a circle”. The relationship between Adorno’s and Emerson’s conceptions of critical disclosure is complex. However, their juxtaposition allows for a distinction between two directions of critical disclosure. It will be argued that disclosing critique of society can be understood as an exemplary dissociation from alienated society by means of a creative association of empirical knowledge, poetic description and philosophical speculation by a critic standing, as it were, with one foot inside and the other outside our form of life. (shrink)

‘Immanent criticism' has been discussed by philosophers of quite different persuasions, working in separate areas and in different traditions of philosophy. Almost all of them agree on roughly the same story about its origins: It is that Hegel invented immanent criticism, that Marx later developed it, and that the various members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, refined it in various ways, and that they are all paradigmatic practitioners of immanent criticism. I call this the Continuity Thesis. There are four (...) different claims that interest me. Hegel is the originator of immanent criticism. Hegel's dialectical method is that of immanent criticism. Adorno practises immanent criticism and endorses the term as a description of his practice. Adorno's dialectical method is fundamentally Hegelian. In this article, I offer an account of immanent criticism, on the basis of which, I evaluate these four claims and argue that the Continuity Thesis should be rejected. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyse Axel Honneth's theory of recognition by focusing on two distinct methodological approaches present in it, namely, critique and reconstruction. The critical moment in Honneth's theory of recognition is articulated around two concepts: world-disclosing critique, which is based on the attempt to suggest new and provocative points of view on social reality through the usage of rhetorical devices; and misrecognition, as the empirical starting-point for the theoretical model. These two notions, which can be traced back to (...) Adorno and the so called "first generation" of the Frankfurt School, are interpreted as the mainlines of the diagnostic moment in Honneth's critical theory, as they provide an effective analytical insight into the reality of social suffering. Furthermore, they represent the basic fundament upon which the second level, reconstruction, is articulated. By bringing to light the core aspects of social interaction, they provide the initial clues for the development of the normative framework of recognition, the formal idea of a "good life". The final part of the paper argues that such an interpretation of Honneth's theory of recognition helps to overcome some of its most problematic aspects and thus to deepen its critical potential. (shrink)

I address the question of human agency from the perspective of critical social theory, starting from the premise that, today, such theories must focus on the global ecological disaster. I assume, furthermore, that radical societal change is necessary in order to arrest our current disastrous ecological trajectory. Radical societal change calls for a fundamental re-orientation in values globally, on both an individual and collective level. This entails a thorough-going change in perceptions of what it means to lead an ethically good (...) life, including revision of deepseated conceptions of ethical agency, in particular, the idea of individual freedom. Wearing the hat of an engaged theorist, I propose a re-imagining and rearticulation of freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming political agency. Taking social institutions as an example, I discuss non-authoritarian authority as a force for forming and transforming ethical perceptions and attribute a similar non-authoritarian potential to critical social theories, in this case a disclosive one. While a change in ethical perceptions will not be sufficient for the required societal transformation, I claim that it is an integral component of it. (shrink)

While the framework of social pathology remains a crucial tool for critical social theorists, there is confusion and debate surrounding the precise nature of the heuristic. The core argument of this article is that while the diagnosis of social pathology harbours radical potential as a critical device, recent developments have led to the ascendancy of a restrictive, recognition-cognitive understanding. I argue that this has displaced alternate, more radical framings. To illustrate the changing face of the heuristic, this article opens by (...) articulating the merits and demerits of five predominant conceptions of social pathology. The second section elucidates the turn to increasingly view social pathology in a manner compatible with just one of these five framings. By drawing on, and extending, the existing critical literature, I seek to demonstrate the relative limitations of such an understanding. Throughout this analysis, I argue for the continued relevance of social pathology diagnosis, the need for sustained critical scholarship, and the dangers of embracing too readily the turn to an exclusively recognition-cognitive understanding of social pathology. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 72-91, Spring 2021.

In this paper I argue that the pessimistic reading of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which suggests reason is ensconced within the domination of myth, misses a key component of the authors' argument. Specifically, it misses the possibility that the liberation from the heteronomy of myth might occur via a critique of myth. Using Owen Hulatt’s reinterpretation of Adorno’s account of the tension between mimesis and self-preservation as a point of orientation, I show that while myth for Horkheimer and (...) Adorno is synonymous with a heteronomous form of life, they simultaneously recognize it as an incomplete but largely untapped mediator of the history of human experience (via language), and thus a promising source of rational self-knowledge. Specifically, myth can illuminate fragments of both the contingent factors that led to human sociality becoming entwined with domination, while also offering momentary reflections of the kinds of life that were relinquished in the drive for instrumentalised survival. I propose that for Horkheimer and Adorno it is myth’s linguistic mediation between a community of speakers and their (often violent and ambiguous) pasts that is unique. It is thus myth’s capacity to offer a meditation on those other possibilities of human existence that presents a renewed chance of enlightenment. (shrink)

Nikolas Kompridis has recently argued that the future of critical theory depends upon a critical appropriation of Heidegger’s concept of ‘world disclosure’, and hence on a transformation of critical theory into a form of ‘world-disclosing critique’ oriented towards the future. This article engages in a critical dialogue with Kompridis' account of world-disclosing critique, arguing that critical theory should embrace it as an innovative way of retrieving the forgotten tradition of aesthetic critique of modernity.

The question of how meaning serves to sustain dominance has been part of the programme of a critique of ideology from the outset. If ideology makes the meaning of the social world and its interpretations decontested, a main task of the critique of ideology is to show their contestability. I would like to reconsider the value of metaphor within this programme and claim that metaphors are noteworthy devices for the critique of ideology due to their ability to undermine ideological incontestability: (...) by calling into question its consistency, by exploring other possible interpretations and by enriching its univocal character, that is, through evoking a new way of seeing social reality, metaphors manage to disclose the contestability of the social world and its interpretations. (shrink)

Books reviewed: Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000. By Geoff Eley.. Foucault, Subjectivity, and Identity. By Robert Strozier.. Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action. By Albert O. Hirschman. Twentieth‐anniversary edition, with a new foreword by Robert H. Frank.

:This essay provides a reading of Steve McQueen's critically acclaimed movie Hunger, which tells the story of the hunger strike of Bobby Sands in light of contemporary hunger strikes around the world and especially in Guantánamo. The central concern of the essay is to read Hunger together with Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, showing how both works problematize the sacrificial subjectivity of enlightenment, its instrumental rationality, and sovereign temporality, while advancing a devastating critique of Western civilization. I argue that (...) Hunger situates the high-security prison within the self-destructive tendency of enlightenment and depicts how self-sacrificial resistance emerges as a response to sovereign domination. Interpreting the figure of Bobby Sands as the reversal of Odysseus in the encounter with the Sirens, I explore how insurgent sacrifice interrupts the dialectic of enlightenment and points to a new configuration of subjectivity and time. (shrink)

This article reinterprets the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a retelling of the Christian myth of the Fall. Through its account of the aporia, which Horkheimer and Adorno maintain stands at its core, the Dialectic of Enlightenment rearticulates the doctrine of original sin. The human condition is presented as tragic, and the source of this tragedy is inscribed into the very structure of human subjectivity. While the Dialectic of Enlightenment refuses to abandon hope, emancipation is reconceptualised on the model of redemption; (...) a kind of fulfilment of human nature, which would at the same time be an escape from it. Horkheimer and Adorno dispense, however, with any transcendent source of grace. Instead, the activity of philosophy itself takes on redemptive quality. (shrink)

I consider argumentation from the point of view of context-transcendent cognitive transformation through reference to the critical social theory of Jürgen Habermas. My aim is threefold. First, to make the case for a concept of context-transcendent cognitive transformation. Second, to clarify the transformatory role of argumentation itself by showing that, while argumentation may contribute constructively to context-transcendent cognitive transformation, such transformation presupposes the existence of a reality conceptually independent of argumentation. Third, to cast light on the problem of how to (...) justify argumentatively the poetically formulated, novel and innovative semantic contents that may be required for context-transcendent cognitive transformation. I conclude that the difficulties involved in argumentatively assessing novel and innovative semantic contents should not be misconstrued as evidence of an unbridgeable gap between language and experience but rather suggest the need for a more dynamic normative conception of language and for a more receptive model of autonomous agency. (shrink)