Why the fuck are there leftists out there who recommend this bloated CIA adjacent fuck?

  • Pisha [she/her, they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    This still seems a bit confused. There's many bad things you can say about Jürgen Habermas -- he really is a liberal philosopher who has worked to defang the critical potential of the Frankfurt School -- but he is not a Heideggerian (and yes, he was a member of the Hitler Youth until the war ended when he was about 15). In fact, he is about the strongest enemy of French theory (and Heidegger) there is in contemporary German philosophy. There would be more to say about the relation of Derrida and Habermas, but the fact that they were interviewed for the same book is not a very strong connection between them.

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      At the end of the 1990s, Habermas approached Derrida at a party held at an American university where both were lecturing. They then met at Paris over dinner, and participated afterwards in many joint projects. In 2000 they held a joint seminar on problems of philosophy, right, ethics, and politics at the University of Frankfurt. In December 2000, in Paris, Habermas gave a lecture entitled "How to answer the ethical question?" at the Judeities. Questions for Jacques Derrida conference organized by Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly. Following the lecture by Habermas, both thinkers engaged in a very heated debate on Heidegger and the possibility of Ethics. The conference volume was published at the Editions Galilée (Paris) in 2002, and subsequently in English at Fordham University Press (2007).

      Come on the connection is pretty strong

      • Pisha [she/her, they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Let me also quote Wikipedia:

        Habermas and Jacques Derrida engaged in a series of disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual understanding and friendship in the late 1990s that lasted until Derrida's death in 2004. They originally came in contact when Habermas invited Derrida to speak at The University of Frankfurt in 1984. The next year Habermas published "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity in which he described Derrida's method as being unable to provide a foundation for social critique. Derrida, citing Habermas as an example, remarked that, "those who have accused me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric ... have visibly and carefully avoided reading me". After Derrida's final rebuttal in 1989 the two philosophers did not continue, but, as Derrida described it, groups in the academy "conducted a kind of 'war', in which we ourselves never took part, either personally or directly".

        Really, for philosophy this is not much of a connection.

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 years ago

          Habermas and Jacques Derrida engaged in a series of disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual understanding and friendship in the late 1990s that lasted until Derrida’s death in 2004

          I'm interested in your definition of "connection" if paling around with an anti-marxist who advanced the works of fascists like Hannah Arendt doesn't count as suspect

            • dinklesplein [any, he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I wouldn't agree with calling Arendt a Fascist either, but racist lib certainly. (inb4 :same-picture: )

              Regardless, I would be careful entirely dismissing post-war continental philosophy, it's not productive to dismiss an entire intellectual tradition that has valuable insights on post-Fordian capitalism just because the authors were a) somewhat difficult to understand and b) weren't literally full blown Marxist-Leninists within an environment hostile hostile to such views. Hard to understand writing is almost an inevitability when it comes to continental philosophy, the fact of the matter is that it's just hard to explain some things, especially if you thought of a concept that no one else has put that much thought into or examined particularly deeply. For most writers, trying to describe their ideas is like trying to describe colour to a blind person.