{"id":268,"date":"2019-09-22T12:49:56","date_gmt":"2019-09-22T16:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/?p=268"},"modified":"2019-09-25T12:55:14","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T16:55:14","slug":"bernard-e-harcourt-introduction-to-critique-2-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-introduction-to-critique-2-13\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Introduction to Critique 2\/13"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt <\/strong><\/p>\n

We turn today to two texts. First, Horkheimer\u2019s 1937 article \u201cTraditional and Critical Theory,\u201d which sets forth the blueprint of Horkheimer\u2019s vision of the research project and method for the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Second, Adorno\u2019s own blueprint, six years earlier in 1931, of his vision of philosophical research and method, in his lecture \u201cThe Actuality of Philosophy\u201d delivered as the inaugural lecture on the occasion of his entry into the philosophy department at the University of Frankfurt. I propose that we pair these two very different texts because of the subsequent history of Horkheimer and Adorno\u2019s close intellectual collaboration, in order to explore the tensions, hopefully fruitful, in their diverging points of departure.<\/p>\n

We are joined today by Professor Axel Honneth, the Jack C. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, the C4-Professor of Social Philosophy at the Goethe-Universit\u00e4t Frankfurt am Main, and the former director of the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe-Universit\u00e4t Frankfurt am Main.<\/p>\n

At our last seminar, we discussed methods of reading, and several were proposed. Lydia Goehr proposed an Adornian method of reading, one that takes philosophical texts, like artworks, as having a history and afterlife, and that calls on us to do justice to the texts and to ourselves. Nadia Urbinati urged us not to distort texts and to speak instead in our own voice. \u00c9tienne Balibar proposed a Deleuzian method of reading as a form of dramatization that turns the text into a battlefield.<\/p>\n

Axel Honneth, by contrast, proposed four different methods of reading\u2014but favored one, which he called the “dialogical.” By contrast to philological, ideological, or instrumental readings, Honneth leaned toward being in dialogue with a text: to reject what one cannot understand from the text, engage what one can, and be in conversation with one’s ideas and work.<\/p>\n

It is this method, I suspect, that will guide Honneth\u2019s reading of these texts today. For Axel Honneth has been in dialogue with the writings of Horkheimer and Adorno\u2014especially Horkheimer, more so than Adorno\u2014for all of his intellectual life.<\/p>\n

His first book, The Critique of Power<\/em>, published in 1985, starts from a dialogue with Horkheimer, and what animates the entire work is his finding of a \u201csociological deficit\u201d in Horkheimer\u2019s 1937 essay. It is to repair and overcome that sociological deficit that Honneth turned first to the writings of Michel Foucault on relations of power, but then ultimately, to Habermas\u2019s communicative action theory. In dialogue with Horkheimer, and then Habermas, Honneth was able, at the time, to reconstruct a critical social theory for our times.<\/p>\n

Honneth\u2019s method there was, in part, dialogical; but I would add that it also had an element of Balibar\u2019s idea of the text as battlefield (as reflected in the searing critique of Horkheimer\u2019s \u201csociological deficits\u201d), and was also close to the fourth method that Honneth called instrumental\u2014and that I had called, last seminar, \u201cpresentist\u201d or \u201cbrutalist,\u201d trying to rehabilitate terms that no one likes, but that today I will simply call \u201cengaged.\u201d Honneth\u2019s reading of Horkheimer in The Critique of Power\u00a0<\/em>was an engaged reading, like the one I call for: to read critical texts in order to rejuvenate critical social theory for today.<\/p>\n

Axel Honneth also deploys a similar approach in his more recent work, The Idea of Socialism<\/em>. There, Honneth takes the nineteenth century idea of socialism and strips it of its historical context\u2014the context of the Industrial Revolution\u2014strips it as well of its Marxist philosophy of history and assumptions about the proletariat, and then infuses it with, or steeps it in, the sphere of political deliberation. That work represents an effort, I would argue, to wrestle with the idea of socialism, to extract it from its historical origins and framework, and infuse it with ideas about deliberative democracy.<\/p>\n

This may be a dialogical reading of an idea\u2014but it is also surely \u201cengaged\u201d in the sense that I propose in \u201cThe Illusion of Influence<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enough on method for now though\u2014or at least, on our reading method in this seminar\u2014let\u2019s turn, or rather let\u2019s return\u00a0<\/em>now, to these two formative texts from the 1930s to see what work they can do for us, today.<\/p>\n

Welcome to Critique 2\/13!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt We turn today to two texts. First, Horkheimer\u2019s 1937 article \u201cTraditional and Critical Theory,\u201d which sets forth the blueprint of Horkheimer\u2019s vision of the research project and method for the Institute for Social Research at the… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[51803],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-2-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}