Originally posted on sciy.org by Debashish Banerji on Fri 31 Jul 2009 01:16 AM PDT  

From Post to Neo and back: Habermas and Derrida 

Raymond van de Wiel

“Do we not perhaps above all bear witness to and even participate in the ‘production of a new subjectivity’? Do not the changes in capitalism find an unexpected ‘encounter’ in the slow emergence of a new Self as a centre of resistance? Each time there is a social change, is there not a movement of subjective reconversion with its ambiguities but also its potential?’ -- Gilles Deleuze1

It seems to me that there is an interesting ‘reconversion’ of the prefix ‘post’ toward something that could more appropriately be called ‘neo’, an inversion that has slowly but irreversibly trickled down from the high end of the ivory, conservative, tower to its thriving base. ‘It is surprising to see how many of the dreams from the sixties … have become reality in present-day corporate culture… The nomad became realised in the flex-worker… This calls for serious deliberation about the expiration date of these ideals.’2 Even though the writer of the newspaper article from which this quote is taken has to turn to a rather strained analogy, there is an urgency to his remark, which leads me to wonder how it is that a reactive and unsympathetic interpretation of the ‘post’ (as in postmodern and poststructuralism) has become so all pervasive that nowadays the majority of ‘leftist/liberal’ academics and thinkers potentially sympathetic to the ‘post’ (let alone the general public), believe that these ideals have backfired upon themselves, or rather been dialectically recuperated by their antithesis, turning their ideals into the service of the ‘neo’ (as in neo-conservative), and feel that their stylistic complexity reflects the unproductive and ineffective ‘vanguardism’ in which modernism stranded (turning them effectively into neo-modernists), a complexity which necessitates their moulding into commodified ‘positions’ in order to be able to ‘deal’ with them in the realms of philosophy and politics, hence reducing them in a way similar as Manfred Frank has done in his Was ist Neostructuralismus?3

The German reservation towards a Literarisiering of philosophy fits the German philosophical tradition which, owing much to Kant, generally aims towards a ‘rationally achieved synthesis with a universalist scope’.4 But this hardly explains the vehement hostility which the ‘post’ has attracted in Germany, a hostility which almost equals the antipathy towards the ‘post’ that can be perceived in the writings of many more or less ‘liberal’ analytic philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon world. A possibly productive critical stance has turned into solidified antagonism in which otherwise discriminating thinkers seem to loose all sense of subtlety. It is in this climate that Frank has labelled Lyotard a ‘neo-Fascist’ and Habermas has called several of the main proponents of poststructuralism (among which Derrida and Foucault) a bunch of ‘young conservatives’.5

But the failure of the ‘post’ is not only affirmed from the outside. Even people who themselves have been identified as postmodernists, like Baudrillard and Jameson, have commented that many poststructuralist ideas, like for example Foucault’s ‘antistatism’, can only end in anarchy, terrorism, or other forms of disorganized and therefore useless kinds of protest. Foucault’s nondialectical synchronic framework of analysis, they conclude, is ultimately programmed by ‘the system’ itself.6 Also the leftist-populist criticism of the likes of Žižek has done the ‘post’, while easier to refute, little good.7

It is in these troubled times of a new wave of ‘global’ terrorism and new formations of protest against the present horizon of ‘liberal-capitalist globalisation’ that this criticism gains a new urgency. Has ‘poststructuralist’ thought indeed become a ‘dead-end theory’ which offers no viable alternatives to hegemony, no adequate analytic tools for understanding and reforming present cultural-political-economic-mediatic formations? And if so, do the critics of the ‘post’ themselves present us with a viable alternative by which to critically analyse the hegemonic triangle of democracy, economy and representation?

It is obviously difficult to answer sweeping questions like these definitively, but what I will argue is that it is possible to cast serious doubts about the criticism that German philosophers, and more specifically Habermas, have levelled upon poststructuralist thought. The infamous debate between ‘Foucauldians’ and ‘Habermasians’ which has continued since the sudden death of Foucault in 1984, has brought several of these doubts to the fore. Still, despite its depth and development, I believe that, for an evaluation of the instrumentality of the two opposing Continental perspectives for our present time, it makes more sense to turn to the less heated, but equally long-lived debate between Habermas and Derrida, a debate which includes commentary on more recent socialpolitical developments. A debate, also, which has seen the shift from the open hostility voiced above, to a more sympathetic stance, being crowned by Habermas’ recent remarks about their relationship:

Over and beyond all the politics, what connects me to Derrida is the philosophical reference to an author like Kant. Admittedly – and though we’re roughly the same age, our life histories have been very different – what separates us is the later Heidegger… When Derrida and I mutually understand our so different background motives, a difference of interpretation must not be taken as a difference in the thing being interpreted. Be that as it may, “truce” or “reconciliation” are not really the proper expressions for a friendly and open-minded interchange.8

I believe that the ‘cease fire’ between the two philosophers—for I do, despite Habermas’ contention, believe that one could speak of a ‘truce’—which has led to several ‘joint’ or rather ‘semi-joint’ projects (semi-joint because this recent ‘friendly interchange’ has, until Derrida’s untimely dead late in 2004, unfortunately never been developed to the full) offers possibilities to comment on some of their older texts and ‘positions’ and might thus give us a ‘state of the art mapping of their differences and similarities’—a ‘diagram’ which I believe to be more suited to address the questions that we are dealing with today. What we need, I will argue, is to move in a non-dialectical way ‘beyond’ the simplistic oppositionalism which has prevented, and continues to prevent, both the ‘post’ and its serious critics to explore the fertile terrain of their intersection. I believe the more recent texts will put us on this trail. It is only with this joint effort that we can critically apprehend the ‘real neo’, that is the neo-conservatism which has become so pervasive in global politics in recent years.

The obvious starting point for the analysis of the Habermas – Derrida debate is Habermas’ 1987 book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity in which one ‘lecture’ and one ‘excurses’ deal with Derrida. In lecture VII, called ‘Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida’s Critique of Phonocentrism’, Habermas writes that his goal is to “test whether his [Derrida’s] grammatologically distanced conception of the history of Being avoids the objection that was raised by Heidegger against Nietzsche and that recoils upon Heidegger himself: ‘The Nietzschean demolition remains dogmatic and, like all reversals, a captive of that metaphysical edifice which it professes to overthrow’.”9 In his “excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature” – its title reflecting the German anxiety for obliteration of disciplinary boundaries mentioned above – Habermas claims that Derrida is “particularly interested in standing the primacy of logic over rhetoric, canonized since Aristotle, on its head”.10 Whereas in the lecture Habermas seems to criticize Derrida for his ‘labyrinthine’ recoil into the bedrock of the metaphysical philosophy of being, ‘degrading’ politics and history to the status of the ontic, in the excurses he seems to deny any philosophical status to ‘deconstruction’: “the deconstructive enterprise cannot be pinned down to the discursive obligations of philosophy and science.”11 Instead he portrays deconstruction as a critique of style, thus as a literary criticism that assesses texts “in accord with the standards of rhetorical success and not those of logical consistency.” Despite his soothing words about the function of literary criticism at the end of the excursus, his disdain for it, and thus also for deconstruction, is more than evident. This evaluation is very unfortunate, not to say ill-advised, because it is based on the very limited, ‘Americanised’ version of deconstruction: “Since Derrida does not belong to those philosophers who like to argue” Habermas finds it “expedient to take a closer look at [Derrida’s] disciples in literary criticism within the Anglo-Saxon climate of argument” in order to see whether his thesis really holds.12 Arguing might indeed not be the right word, but Derrida does respond to Habermas, briefly but adequately: “Those who accuse me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric (see, for example, the latest book by Habermas …) have visibly and carefully avoided reading me.”13 Although the excursus succeeds the lecture in PDM, its conclusion that Derrida’s generic levelling dulls the sword of philosophical criticism seems to preconceive a hostile reading of Derrida’s grammatology in lecture VII.

In this essay Habermas goes through Husserl’s theory of meaning step by step in order to show exactly the point at which Derrida’s critique of this theory begins: “Against the Platonizing of meaning and against the disembodying interiorization of its linguistic expression,” pinpoints Habermas, adding that “one might even say: the transcendental primacy of the sign against the meaning.”14 He then remarks that “interestingly” Derrida’s reflections “are not aimed at those premises of the philosophy of consciousness that make it impossible to identify language as an intersubjectively constituted intermediate domain that has a share in both the transcendental character of world-disclosure and the empirical character of the innerworldly experienceable” but instead follows Husserl “along the path of separating off … every innerworldly thing from the performances of the subject that are constitutive of the world, in order to take up the battle against the sovereignty of ideally intuited essences within its innermost precincts.” It is not considered by Habermas that Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition might bring him close to his own pragmatism. This is further emphasized by the opposition forged by Habermas between Tugendhat’s commentary on Husserl’s essentialism and that of Derrida. Husserl claims that “each subjective expression is replaceable by an objective expression which will preserve the identity of each momentary meaning-intention.”15 Habermas comments that Tugendhat has shown that this program of translating subjective expressions into situationindependent expressions cannot be carried through: “singular terms, like performative expressions, are examples of genuinely pragmatic meanings that cannot be explained independently of an intersubjective practice of applying rules.”16 He then claims that Derrida “to be sure interprets this state of affairs completely differently”. Derrida understands Husserl’s statement as a symptom of logocentrism, writing that it asserts “the unbounded range of objective reason”.17 It is this prior metaphysical binding of language to reason that, according to Habermas, evokes Derrida’s resistance. This is not necessarily ‘completely different’ from the reading of Tugendhat. If one reads Derrida’s criticism of Husserl in a slightly more sympathetic way, one might even find a few parallels in Derrida’s and Habermas’ work.

When Habermas rephrases Derrida’s central objection to Husserl, he writes that “Husserl permitted himself to be blinded by the fundamental idea of Western metaphysics: that the ideal nature of self-identical meaning is only guaranteed by the living presence of the unmediated, intuitively accessible, actual experience in the interiority of a transcendental subjectivity purified of all empirical associations.”18 From this summary, forged by Habermas himself, at least three conclusions could be drawn which could point to some form of agreement between Derrida and Habermas. First, we could conclude that Derrida does believe in some form of guaranteed meaning, second, that he does not believe in the central role that is assigned to transcendental subjectivity, and third, that if there would be a place for the subject, this subject would be an empirical subject. However, Habermas chooses to ignore all of these possible conclusions and goes on to explain Derrida’s critique that Husserl’s theory (and the whole Western tradition for that matter) subscibes to the questionable primacy of sound patterns over the written pattern. “The written expression,” says Habermas’ Derrida, “reminds us more insistently that the linguistic sign ‘despite the total absence of a subject and beyond a subject’s death,’ makes possible the decipherability of a text and, if it does not exactly guarantee its intelligibility, at least holds it in prospect.”19 Derrida chooses to dismiss phonocentrism because, like Husserl’s (and even Heidegger’s) phenomenology, it “annihilates the original difference of temporal separation and otherness that first makes possible the identity of objects and meanings.” That Derrida here could be said to hint towards a form of context-transcendent meaning based in ‘otherness’, that is to say, outside the realm of ‘ownness’ and thus in between subjects, is not picked up by Habermas. Instead he reduces Derrida’s anti-phonocentrism to a narrow reading: “Unabashedly, and in the style of Ursprungsphilosophie, Derrida falls back on this Urschrift, which leaves its traces anonymously, without any subject. (…) Derrida by no means breaks with the foundationalist tenacity of the philosophy of the subject: he only makes what it had regarded as fundamental dependent on the still profounder—though now vacillating or oscillating—basis of an originative power set temporally aflow.”20

This was admittedly the most antithetical moment in the Habermas-Derrida debate. From here on things can only get better, although we should be wary of the argumentation for this mend. Christopher Norris reasons that Habermas’ opinion of Derrida is misconceived because Derrida is wrongfully identified with the “reactive counter-enlightenment rhetoric that leads from Nietzsche to Bataille, Foucault and other such present-day apostles of unreason.”21 He then distances Derrida from what he calls “postmodern” thinkers who are said to revoke ‘modernity’ or ‘enlightenment’, thereby giving way to “irrationalism”.22 It is indeed possible to do so, but it is an almost Lacanian method to forge a reconciliation, for one could distance almost every ‘postmodern’ thinker from a ‘postmodernity’ so rigorously framed, leaving it as an empty term which serves a the transcendental signifier of lack or empty signifier which fabricates a field of ‘homogeny’. Foucault’s position in “What is Enlightenment?” is simply this: “rather than seeking to distinguish a ‘modern era’ from the ‘premodern’ or the ‘postmodern’, I think it would be more useful to try and find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of ‘countermodernity’.”23 And by attitude he means “a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; … a way of thinking and feeling … of acting and behaving.” This philosophical attitude or ethos, the “critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment” is modernity for Foucault. And I believe that this offers a better chance for a realignment of Habermas and Derrida—not a coming together in a ‘plane of structuration’, as Deleuze would call it, held together by an absent despotic sign (i.e. an empty, non-existent postmodernism), but rather in a ‘plane of consistency’24 which comprises modernity in its divergent, manifold, aporetic and even contradictory realisations—“vacillating and oscillating”. A plane which is not defined by, but nevertheless does not lack a ‘common enemy’, or, ‘limit’: the ‘attitudes of countermodernity’ that Foucault mentioned; the ‘fake illuminati and apostles of unreason’, as Kant called them.25 This limit does not allow for a homogenizing of the plane because it is not absolute—for as Deleuze learns us, an originally revolutionary effort can suddenly turn fascist and a folklore can sometimes unexpectedly be charged with a revolutionary power. Its existence does however prevent ‘theory’ from becoming merely the force-field of contending interests that Habermas fears, because there is an ethical dimension, even if it is sometimes a cryptoethics as a result from a lack of an apparent sociological or political dimension.

Although there are, as I have hinted above, various points of possible agreement between Derrida and Habermas which have been overlooked in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, I believe the terrain of the formation of ethics might be one of the most promising terrains for a “reconciliation”. A terrain which I believe, as might be clear from my evaluation above, also offers possibilities for an alignment between German en French philosophy and thus for an opening of a re-evaluation of the prefix ‘post’. But what exactly does ‘ethics’ mean for these two thinkers, and are these views consumerable?

Habermas theorizes what he calls ‘communicative action’ or ‘discourse ethics’: a dialogical revision of Kant’s formalist moral philosophy, maintaining its claim to universality and its emphasis on autonomy, but trading in the individual, self-conscious beginnings of morality for an intersubjective procedure. It “covers only practical questions that can be debated rationally, i.e. those that hold out the prospect of consensus. It deals not with value preferences but with the normative validity of norms of actions.”26 This procedure, as Simon Critchley remarks, begins from the premise of equality, or symmetry, of the equal treatment of all human beings.27 Turning to Derrida, Critchley then argues that there might be a universal, ‘undeconstructable’ ethical moment in deconstruction:

I think this can be brought out if we look at Derrida’s comments on the concept of the messianic as an a priori structure that, as he puts it, ‘belongs to all language,’ as that promisory, performative, or illocutionary dimension to our speech acts, which, as he describes in an interview, is ‘the universal dimension of experience’.”28

What takes place in the concrete linguistic event of the promise, he continues, is a relation to an other, and thus also Derrida’s ‘universal’ ethical moment is intersubjectively established. “However,” warns Critchley,

what takes place in the concrete linguistic event of the promise is a relation to an other, what Derrida calls a singularity, which is an experience of infinite indebtedness. Thus the messianic a priori describes the structure of intersubjectivity in terms of an assymetrical obligation that I could never meet, to which I would never be equal.”29

Thus Critchley constructs a field of similarities divided by an axis of (a)symmetry.

Let us turn now to a more recent text of Habermas in order to further study this ethical divide. In The Future of Human Nature from 2001, Konstantinos Kavoulakos observes, Habermas does not ‘discursively’ negotiate the norms that ought to govern bio-ethical debates, but rather starts with the conviction that not all types of biotechnical manipulations should be allowed. This is a highly unusual starting point from the vantage point of formalist discourse ethics. Habermas’ ‘defence’ comes from the fact that supposedly the rules change when a transformation of the ethical selfunderstanding of the species is at stake. A programmed body, he argues, will affect my ethical selfunderstanding as autonomous subject and it will create an irreversible paternalism, destroying the premise of equality. Thus, we could conclude, genetic modification could render the procedure of discourse ethics out of joint as this procedure relies exactly on autonomy and equality. In fact this ‘autonomous morality of the free and equal’, Habermas has to admit, is a value preference, something that we want, and this, Kavoulakos rightly notes, ruptures the formalism which “strictly divides morality from ethical life, … universal norms from values that are tied up with a certain form of life.”30 Habermas tries to polish this rupture away through an explanation of these ‘universal’ and ‘rational’ value preferences as ‘ethics of the human species’, presenting it as a anthropological category rather than a historical one:

those intuitive self-descriptions that guide our identification as human beings – that is, our self understanding as members of the species … concern not culture, which is different everywhere, but the vision different cultures have of ‘man’ who – in his anthropological universality – is everywhere the same.”31

Not much later, however, he has to admit that such images of man are plural and we can conclude that indeed we are dealing with a historically constructed image of man rather than a transhistorical one. “If it is a historically and culturally determined ethics … that constructs our self-understanding and thus explains why we should want the morality of reciprocal recognition between free and equal subjects, and our corresponding democratic political principles,” writes Kavoulakos, “then the differences between Habermas and his communitarian critics start to fade away.”32 What we see is that Habermas’ strict formalism, the sharp distinction between norms and values, can ultimately not be maintained. It seems thus that Habermas is nearer to the ‘post’ then he would like to be. Foucault’s relative independence of norms and values seems not such a bad option in this respect.

In Philosophy in a Time of Terror Habermas again seems to run up to a limit of his dialogical model when it comes to ‘global’ terrorism. To maintain his theory, he has to label the ‘new’ global terrorism of for instance Al Qaeda as primarily a criminal activity. He claims that, even though, historically, terrorism falls into a category different from conventional crimes, the criminal actions of politically unrealistic global terrorists, directing an “impotent revolt … against an enemy that cannot be defeated in any pragmatic sense” can never, retrospectively, be legitimized as a result of a political regime change.33 He then, in a reaction to the term ‘war on terrorism’ reflects that this would elevate “these criminals to the status of war enemies.” Habermas does agree that today’s Islamic fundamentalism is a cover for political motifs. “Today,” he writes, “religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.”34 Nevertheless, when this religious orientation leads to a ‘holy war’ against the West, in the light of it being the “driving force of capitalistic modernization”, it is supposedly suddenly depleted from political motifs, because, simply, it would lack any realistic goals. This is a rather bold statement which seems to be born out of a desire to ‘defend’ his conception of ‘communicative action’ whose accuracy has, since ‘September 11’, so often been questioned. Our societies, Habermas analyzes, contain a structural violence, apparently including ‘criminal’ violence, which is the result of distortion of communication which leads, ultimately, “through the spiral of uncontrolled reciprocal mistrust, to the breakdown of communication.”35 On this basis he concludes optimistically that after the eruption of violence “it is possible to know what has gone wrong and what needs to be repaired.” And this is valid for both intracultural and intercultural exchanges:

The constant deconstructivist suspicion of our Eurocentric prejudices raises a counterquestion: why should the hermeneuntic model of understanding … suddenly break down beyond the boundaries of our own culture? … Struggling with the difficulties of understanding, people must step by step, widen their original perspectives and ultimately bring them together. And they can succeed in such a ‘fusion of horizons’ by virtue of their peculiar capacity to take up the roles of ‘speaker’ and ‘hearer.’ Taking these roles in a dialogue, they engage in a fundamental symmetry, which, at the bottom, all speech situations require.36

Precondition for the development of such a common horizon, says Habermas, is a mutual perspective-taking because without the structures of a communicative situation free from distortion, the results are always under the suspicion of having been forced by a superior party. But does Habermas not here, conflate his goal, putting a stop to the cyclical reproduction of violence, and its prerequisite condition? Is this not an impossibility which in fact, indeed, make violence a structural element of communication?

It is interesting that Habermas in a latter interview seems to nuance his take on terrorism, claiming that “in international terrorism…we are encountering a new phenomenon, which we should not be too quick to assimilate to what we already know.”37 One way of approaching this new phenomenon, I would offer, is through Deleuze’s concept of the war machine. Read as a ‘war machine’, global terrorism has, as opposed to Habermas’ earlier reading, an inherent socialpolitical dimension. “It is at the same time that the State apparatus appropriates the war machine, subordinates it to its ‘political’ aims, and gives it war as its direct object.”38

The concept of the ‘war machine’ is, for several reasons, useful in the context of this discussion. It can be argued that the reaction of the US government to wage the ‘war on terrorism’, in its initial stage, against a nation-state (Afghanistan), and, consequently, the naming of, again, nation-states as being part of the ‘axis of evil’, is the State’s inability to grasp the ‘nomadic’ organisation of a war machine. One could also argue that global terrorism is that limit of modernity which Foucault calls countermodernity, and to some extent it is, but, at the same time it is not completely outside modernity, it impinges on its borders. The force of ‘9/11’, for instance, was amplified by its relation to modernity’s mediatic construction. Just as the ‘war machine’ is only relative in its opposition to the State apparatus—“they function as a pair”—global terrorism functions only in relation to ‘modernity’.39 At the same time, however, again just like the war machine, terrorism is irreducible to modernity: “As for the war machine itself, it seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere.”40 Thus, terrorism does and at the same time does not conform to the formal, universalist method of ‘discourse ethics’, and Habermas does get a sense of this when he points at the assymetry of a terrorism which refuses a mutual perspective-taking. However, doing away the most extreme forms of terrorism as criminal, is not an empirical but merely a formal classification, not meant to understand or explicate the phenomenon but rather to maintain the formalistic and universalist claims of ‘discourse ethics’.

As Derrida puts it acutely: “What is legitimated by the prevailing system (a combination of public opinion, the media, the rhetoric of politicians and the presumed authority of all those who, through various mechanisms, speak or are allowed to speak in the public space) are thus the norms inscribed in every apparently meaningful phrase that can be constructed with the lexicon of violence, aggression, crime, war, and terrorism, with the supposed differences between war and terrorism, national and international terrorism, state and nonstate terrorism”41 and, I might add, ‘legitimate’ and criminal terrorism. Is not Habermas’ claim that we need to have a “solid base of common background convictions, self-evident truths, and reciprocal expectations” in order to divert distortion of communication, in fact very close to this ‘accredited discourse in the world’s public space’ that Derrida describes? And is not the move to label certain forms of terrorism as criminal, in effect a move to effectively deny an opinion, detestable as it may be, access to the supposed democratic and universalist method of discourse ethics on the grounds that it is not, in Derrida’s words, legitimated by the prevailing system, which does not pertain to the ‘common convictions and self-evident truths’ of the “discourse that comes to be, in a pervasive and overwhelming, hegemonic fashion” as a result of the aforementioned ‘legitimated’ field of those who are allowed to speak?

Again, I would say, Habermas is closer to Derrida than he might think, not only because his formalist symmetric system could be seen as parallel to what Derrida describes as an ‘autoimmunitary process’, but also because I believe that we should not interpret the limits of discourse ethics as a disqualifying flaw, but rather as a chance to reconsider this ‘method’. Rather than seeing it as a pristine description I would suggest to see it as that what we want, a utopian quest towards the ideal of symmetrical communication. Read in this way, discourse ethics is in fact very close to Derrida’s conception of a democracy-to-come, which also subscribes to a utopian, be it principally unrealizable, future. It is here that Derrida and Habermas seem to find each other in their cosmopolitan world-order.

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1 in Foucault, (Paris: Minuit, 1986), tr. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 115.
2 Ger Groot, ‘Bouwen met schuim’, NRC-Handelsblad, june 25, 2004, p. 25.
3 (Franfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984).
4 Simon Critchley and Axel Honneth, ‘Philosophy in Germany’, in Radical Philosophy, v 89 (may/june 1998).
5 cf. Mark Poster, `Postmodernity and the politics of multiculturalism: the Lyotard-Habermas debate over social theory', Modern Fiction Studies, v 38 (1992), pp. 567-80.
6 cf. Paul Bové, ‘The Foucault Phenomenon: the Problematics of Style’, Foreword to the English translation of Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, tr. by Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1988).
7 cf. ‘The Ongoing “Soft Revolution”’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 30 (2003), no. 2.
8 America and the World; A Conversation with Jürgen Habermas’, Eduardo Mendieta, https://www.logosjournal.com/habermas_america.htm
9 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 166. Hereafter PDM.
10 Ibid., p. 187.
11 Ibid., p. 189, the next quote is from p. 188.
12 Ibid., p. 193. See also: Christopher Norris, “Deconstruction, Postmodernism, Philosophy”, in: Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves and Seyla Benhabib (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996) pp. 97-123.
13 reprinted in: Points… interviews 1974-1997, ed. by Elizabeth Weber, tr. by Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 218.
14 Habermas, PDM, p. 171, the next quotations are from pp. 171-2.
15 Husserl quoted in Habermas, PDM, p. 173.
16 Habermas, PDM, p. 173, the next quote is also from this page.
17 Derrida quoted in Habermas, PDM, p. 173.
18 Habermas PDM, pp. 174-5, my italics.
19 ibid., p. 177. The next quotation is from the same page.
20 ibid. pp. 178-9.
21 Norris, p. 115-6.
22 Ibid., p. 117.
23 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, in: Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow (ed.) (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 309-10, my italics. The next quote is from p. 309.
24 cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Helen R. Lane, Robert Hurley and Mark Seem (Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 1983), esp. pp. 309-10.
25 rephrased in Norris, p. 118.
26 Habermas quoted in Konstantinos Kavoulakos, “Ruptured Formalism: The Challenge of Bioethics and the Limits of Moral Formalism”, in Radical Philosophy, v. 125 (may/june 2004), p 37.
27 Simon Critchley, “Remarks on Derrida and Habermas”, in Constellations, v. 7 (2000:4), p. 459.
28 Ibid., p. 457.
29 Ibid., p. 458.
30 Kavoulakos, p. 37, quotation altered.
31 Habermas quoted in Kavoulakos, p. 41.
32 Kavoulakos, p. 42.
33 Habermas in Giovanna Borradri, ed., Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.
34. (hereafter PTT). The next quote is from pp. 34-5. Italics mine. 34 Ibid., p. 33. The next quotation is from p. 32. 35 Ibid., p.
35. The next quote is also from that page.
36 Ibid., p. 36-7.
37 Habermas, ‘America and the World”, an interview by Eduardo Mendieta, Logos Journal, vol. 3.3 (summer 2004), p. 7, www.logosjournal.com/habermas_america.htm.
38 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Atlone Press, 1988), p. 420.
39 Ibid., p. 351.
40 Ibid., p. 352.
41 Derrida, PTT, p. 93. The next quotes in this paragraph are also from this page.

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