Among the dominant themes in today’s critical and philosophical debate, the question of what constitutes the particular status of our modernity seems to gain in scope and interest almost every day. The literature on the designation of various modernities, the roots of our own modernity, epochal breaks, or change of paradigms in our mode of knowledge is constantly growing. All this reflects, of course, our own historical position at the end of the twentieth century. The quest, however, for what is modern and the search for the specific features of modernism are as old as the modern age itself as it originated with Bacon and Descartes. A self-reflective consciousness of time combined with a need for self-assurance accompany the modern age through all its phases, and this quite naturally. For being modern means essentially a departure from exemplary models of the past, a decentering of habitual ways of viewing the world, and the necessity for producing normative standards out of oneself. This is combined with an opening to the future which has the necessary result that the moment of a new beginning constituting modernity will incessantly produce itself again and again.
These considerations have come forth since the late seventeenth century in a certain type of semiphilosophical, semi-literary writing that thematizes the topic of modernity and simultaneously exhibits its problematic nature. For writing about modernity, especially one’s own, is an act that inevitably engenders history and relegates modernity to the past. No direct way of writing can escape from this paradox. As the most extreme expression of time, modernity is like an endless fuse cord that keeps consuming itself. Regarding this inherent paradox, Nietzsche wrote, “Being is only an uninterrupted has-been, a thing that lives by negating, consuming and contradicting itself.”1 With only a seemingly different twist of thought, Foucault declared it to be the task of philosophy to explain today and that which we are today. Yet he also recommended doing this without declaring today as the moment of the greatest damnation or the daybreak of the dawning sun and added, “No, it is a day like every other day or rather a day never precisely like the others.”2
It is from these considerations that the notion of the postmodern, of postmodernity, has originated—a notion that because of its enhanced paradoxical structure has become a real annoyance to some of my colleagues in the humanities. The prefix post seems to suggest—as in postcapitalist, poststructuralist, postfeminist, or postnuclear—a new period, another epoch after a former one, a relief, so to speak, from the past, and, because of a lack of a new designation, contents itself with canceling out the previous system without completely deleting it. Yet in the case of postmodern, this does not work, because modern is already the most advanced period designation and cannot be outdone. Postmodernity therefore reveals itself as an ironic notion communicating indirectly, by way of circumlocution, configuration, and bafflement, the necessity and impossibility of discussing the status of modernity in a straightforward and meaningful manner. Postmodernity, in its twisted posture, seems to be the awareness of this paradox, and consequently of the status of modernity, in a somersaulting fashion.
This seems to be at least the most general connotation of the term in many of today’s writings. From here, postmodernity appears to be that attitude in which the problems, questions, and issues of modernity accumulate in an unheard-of way, which explains the constant references to forerunners, to anticipations of postmodernism in previous centuries, to writers such as Nietzsche or Diderot. Postmodernism is neither an overcoming of modernity nor a new epoch, but a critical continuation of modernism which is itself both critique and criticism. Criticism now turns against itself, and postmodernism thereby becomes a radicalized, intensified version of modernism, as would seem to be implied through a certain nuance in the prefix post. A comparison of postmodernism to the notion of avant-garde seems to confirm this impression, because avant-garde clearly gives us the idea of outdoing, of advancing, of a future-oriented innovation, whereas the retrospective attitude of postmodernism seems to relate to the past, if only through self-criticism and self-doubt.
Yet with equal reason, we can see postmodernism as that situation in which all the ideals of modernity have come to their exhaustion, that phase which claims to have experienced the end of metaphysics, the end of philosophy, and the end of man. We should be careful, however, not to construe these events as the beginning of a new period, as unavoidable as it may seem for us to think in such categories. For if postmodernism opened an entirely new phase of intellectual history, of antimodernism or the accomplished transgression of modernism, it would continue the innovative trend of modernity, something which seems to be precluded by the paradoxical configuration of its name. One good way of expressing this feature would be to say that the postmodernist mind is just as skeptical about the historical designation of epochs as it is about structural unification in terms of system.
From this latter perspective, postmodernism is the rejection of any totalized conception of truth in the sense of global philosophies of history, all-embracing systems of meaning, or uniform foundations of knowledge. What motivates the postmodern mentality instead can be described as a radical pluralism of thought and opinion, without the presumption, however, that such a state of plurality and openness will ever be fully realized. What is certain in the given situation is heterogeneity in discourse and fallibility in theory formation. Historically speaking, postmodernism is an alignment with Nietzsche’s perspectivism and the refusal of Hegelianism, of Hegel’s equation of truth with totality, as well as of his entire teleology. Another way of describing postmodernism would be through semiotics, by saying that in our society the relationship between signifier and signified is no longer intact, in that signs do not refer to something signified, a pregiven entity, but always to other signs. We thus never reach the true meaning of things, but only other signs, interpretations of other signs, interpretations of interpretations, and we move along in an endless chain of signification.
We could try to say that postmodernism protects the position of the other side, that of the nonsystem, of the woman, the suppressed minority, although we would soon discover that any accusatory criticism combined with rectifying tendencies in the style of ideology critique or even in the old tradition of liberalism would run counter to the antisystematic and atotalitarian drive in postmodernist thinking. Such a critique would eventually be seen as a sign of the reemerging system and of superimposed value structures. It would similarly be questionable to claim that the tradition of modern thought from Kierkegaard to Sartre, existentialism in other words, already articulated the groundlessness and finitude which became decisive in postmodernism. This would be a false canon because groundlessness and infinitude are experienced in existentialism as a deficiency, whereas in postmodernism this experience is one of “joyful wisdom,” of “gaya scienzia.” Postmodernism affirms the “anything goes that works” device in a cheerful mood of self-deprecation and parody. Writing is the main activity of postmodernism. But to write on postmodernism in the form of a handbook or an encyclopedic article would be self-deception.
It would of course be fatuous to restrict the postmodernist mood to theory and philosophy without recognizing similar trends in other areas of life. Architecture is, if not the origin of this movement, then one of its most conspicuous expressions. Fredric Jameson has shown that contemporary architectural trends in the arrangement of our cities or individual buildings counteract fundamental concerns of the modern and rationalist mentality. In their tendency toward the mere surface, the epidermis, the skin, and by eliminating any “depth dimension” (for instance, in Los Angeles), these architectural trends offset traditional models of building characteristic of the modern phase, such as the dialectical model of essence and appearance, the psychoanalytical model of latent and manifest, the existentialist model of authenticity and nonauthenticity, the Marxist model of alienation and reconciliation, and the semiotic model of signifier and signified.3
In the more general sphere of aesthetic life and aesthetic production, these trends find their correspondence in an extension of art to mass society and mass culture. In a now famous image, Adorno once illustrated the modern notion of an elitist autonomy of art with Odysseus’s voyage through the realm of the Sirens.4 Tied to the mast of his boat, he could listen to the seductive singing of the nymphs without succumbing to their attempt to lure him into death, while his deafened sailors oared him through the dangerous zone. This is at least one aspect of this image. In the postmodern relationship to art, the separation of classes is supposedly overcome. The price for this accomplishment, however, is a leveling of art to the standards of a mass culture, an absorption of art by the vulgarity of life. Art is no longer the realm of otherness, no longer able to hold a mirror, to point a finger. One especially striking example of this development is the museum and the hedonistic use of the museum in postmodernist practice. Originally an institution, a temple for the preservation and exhibition of art objects that otherwise would not have survived, the museum has become a postmodernist architectural building surrounded by shops and restaurants where objects of exhibition are evaluated according to economic standards. Computerized data inform about the showability of the museum’s possessions and regulate their acquisition and sale.5 Conversely, and again in accordance with the anything-goes device, purpose-oriented activities based entirely on profit, such as advertising, assume the lofty l’art pour l’art attitude of complete purposelessness. This populist image of postmodernism is interwoven with complex theoretical and philosophical issues. They have come forth in a body of texts marked by an intensified critique of reason and rationality, a bewildering questioning of those values and norms which have governed the course of modern history.
Yet it remains doubtful whether postmodernism has one particular style of expression or one particular area where the postmodern attitude can be seen in its true identity. Nonidentity, oscillating otherness, seems to be the postmodern mode of expression, and the realm of existence for the postmodern mode is precisely there where it presently is not. For philosophers, the postmodern style appears to be more strictly given in literature and critical theory than in philosophy, for literary critics more in architecture, for specialists in architecture perhaps in advertising, and so on. Prototypes of postmodernism are hard to locate and always outdone by something else. Poststructuralism is outdone by deconstruction and deconstruction by what is called the new historicism. For writers in the postmodern style, the evasiveness of their subject matter goes hand in hand with a certain superficiality or even dilettantism in their expertise, a certain “poor philology,” a transgression of limits. Postmodern lectures are taped, postmodern texts are photocopied, and postmodern writings are put onto the word processor.
Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge of 1979 is the theoretical text most directly concerned with these issues.6 As is obvious from its title, the writing is not meant to be an event in itself or an original moment in the evolution of postmodernism, but poses as a comment on a pregiven situation, as a report to the Council of Universities of the government of Quebec on a research project devoted to the “condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies.” The text is a summary of what has happened in the past decade under the headings of poststructuralism, deconstruction, and critique of metaphysics. Yet Lyotard also coins the terms and concepts which have guided or challenged the discussion of these events ever since. The most prominent among them is the term postmodern itself, occurring right at the beginning: “Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age” (PC, 3). By using, however, the paradoxical notion of postmodern with the casual connotation of postindustrial, and by introducing in the context of a report the contemporary crisis of knowledge as a “crisis of narratives,” the text is a full-blown postmodern phenomenon itself, with all the ironic postures and configurations required for this style.
Lyotard’s characterization of postmodernism has various aspects, the most direct of which is perhaps the idea of a transformation of knowledge, even a “mercantilization of knowledge” (PC, 26). The issue is that of a fundamental change in the conception of knowledge that has essentially affected its nature. The criterion of knowledge in the postmodern phase is translatability into computer language, into quantities of information (PC, 23), whereby the old ideal of knowledge as a formation of the mind and the personality dies out and is replaced by a conception of knowledge in terms of suppliers and users, of commodity producers and consumers (PC, 24). Knowledge becomes a major stake in the worldwide competition for power (PC, 26). Another way of describing this state of knowledge would be to say that postmodernism is the departure from any totalizing attempt of reasoning, from any ultimate foundation of truth.
The most famous formulation of this diagnosis is Lyotard’s remark that in postmodernism one no longer believes in “metanarratives.” Metanarratives are those comprehensive as well as foundational discourses in which all details of knowledge and human activity find ultimate sense and meaning. Examples of such metadiscourses or metanarratives are the grand antique, medieval, or rational philosophies, Platonism, for instance, or the great religions of humanity, the utopias of a final unity, reconciliation, and harmony. Lyotard distinguishes between metanarratives of a mythological and of a rational nature and even attributes different periods in the history of humanity to them. In the premodern world, one justified one’s culture through narrations of a mythological or religious character and founded all institutions, social and political practices, laws, ethics, and manners of thinking on a belief in these metanarratives. The modern period began when these founding narratives were no longer mythical or religious, but became rational and philosophical, and secured a meaningful procedure not through a god or a heroic lawgiver, but through the authority of reason. Although rational in their manner of argumentation, they were still narratives because they gave meaning through a projected odyssey with a redemptive type of foundation such as the acquisition of freedom, progressive emancipation, the all-round human personality, or accomplished socialism and welfare. All human realities found a firm basis in these ideas. Good examples of these metanarratives of a rational and modern order are for Lyotard the dialectics of spirit, the emancipation of the rational or the working subject, the hermeneutics of meaning, or the creation of wealth through capitalist techno-science. In a certain way, Hegel’s dialectics of spirit contains all these narratives and can therefore be considered the quintessence of speculative modernity.
Postmodernism, in a word then, is incredulity in the face of such universal metanarratives. They have not been refuted but simply become outworn; they no longer fulfill their function of bestowing sense and meaning upon human activities. They also no longer serve as a foundation for the discourse of the individual sciences, which instead follow their own rules and break up the one grand metadiscourse into myriads of individual languages, of language games and language rules in the respective scientific contexts. Lyotard likes to condense this feature by using Habermas’s notion of a “crisis of legitimation,” of a crumbling legitimacy of authority, but he expands the notion far beyond any state, government, or institutionalized power to a generalized fading away of all overriding authority and legitimacy. For what the classical metanarratives did can very well be characterized as a legitimizing of all particular forms of knowledge, of all individual scientific discourses, those of justice as well as those of truth (PC, 33). After these metadiscourses have been dismissed by incredulity, the question of the legitimacy of knowledge comes up again in a different manner (PC, 112) and certainly cannot be resolved by another form of totalization, by the invention of a new metadiscourse (PC, 109).
Lyotard considers individual language systems as they exist in the individual sciences to be the type of relationship necessary for the existence of society (PC, 56) and, in reference to Wittgenstein, likes to call these discourses language games. He thereby emphasizes the pragmatic aspect in their different ways of enunciation and their inherent rules, but also, what is perhaps more important, the “agonistic” character in and among these games (PC, 41). Rules have no legitimacy in themselves and rest on agreement, on consensus among the players. Yet, as in a game of chess, each new move creates a new situation (PC, 40).
We should be careful, however, not to construe Lyotard’s report on knowledge in the postmodern stage and his thesis of a breakup of one great metanarrative into a multiplicity of individual language games as the new metadiscourse of the postmodern period. He expressly denies any originality or truth value for his account and considers it to be of hypothetical character at best, of strategic value with regard to the point in question, that is, capable of emphasizing certain aspects (PC, 31). Similarly, we should not think about these periods of premodern, modern, and postmodern as having datable ruptures or definite epochal breaks, because their contents and styles overlap in terms of time. The premodern type of mythical and religious legitimation can linger on into the postmodern period just as postmodern scepticism can be found among writers of the premodern age. The premodern, modern, and postmodern modes of legitimation and delegitimation depicted by Lyotard are perhaps best viewed as ideal types. They have, however, also a clearly historical connotation, in that they dominate periods of history. Of special interest in this regard is the relationship between the modern and the postmodern styles. Lyotard maintains that the postmodern manner of thinking does not situate itself after or against the modern, but is enclosed in it, although in hidden fashion. To think about history in a straightforward line is entirely modern, as demonstrated by Christianity, Cartesianism, and Jacobinism. The disappearance of the term “avantgarde” with its military flavor is an indication of the withering away of modernity, because this term is an expression of that old-fashioned modernity at which we are now able to smile.7
In a speech of 1980 with the programmatic title “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,”8 which is now already historical but has had several follow-ups in subsequent writings, Jürgen Habermas attempted to rescue modernity from its postmodernist detractors. He clearly took postmodernity as antimodernity, as an attempt that sacrifices “the tradition of modernity in order to make room for a new historicism” (M, 3), an “anarchistic intention of blowing up the continuum of history,” and a “rebelling against all that is normative” (M, 5). Although this text focused on the “aesthetic modernity” of dadaists and surrealists in the “Café Voltaire” (M, 5), Habermas also ventured into the broader aspects of modernism as based on three autonomous spheres of reason (science, morality, and art), three realms with an “inner logic” and a validity of their own: cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive rationality (M, 9). Whereas enlightened philosophers of the late eighteenth century distinguished these different types of legitimizing reason for the enrichment of life, the twentieth century has shattered this optimism by abandoning the autonomy of these segments to specialists and thereby separating them from everyday communication.
This is for Habermas the crisis of modernity in its most global aspect. His attitude toward this basic problem, however, is obvious from his rhetorical question, “should we try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause?” (M, 9). The answer is of course a rejection of the postmodernists’ “false negation of culture” (M, 11) and a maintenance of “communicative rationality,” of “reproduction and transmission of values and norms” (M, 8) in Habermas’s sense. More directly, he says: “I think that instead of giving up modernity and its project as a lost cause, we should learn from the mistakes of those extravagant programs which have tried to negate modernity” (M, 12). In a rhetorical move hard to comprehend, however, Habermas labels all postmodern critics of the modern type of rationality as “neoconservatives” (M, 6–7), and with a revealing myopia characterizes the French critics, all of his own generation if not considerably older, as “young conservatives,” and describes them as a line that “leads from Georges Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida.” They claim, according to Habermas, “revelations of a decentered subjectivity emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness, and with this experience they step outside the modern world” (M, 14). As Habermas sees it, these writers juxtapose with instrumental reason “a principle only accessible through evocation, be it the will to power or sovereignity, Being or the Dionysiac force of the poetical” (M, 14).
This image of irrationalism is of course just as questionable as the equation of postmodernism with conservatism. On the contrary, it is Habermas’s critique of postmodernism and its foundationalist drive that shows a spontaneous alliance with a traditionalist, conservative fundamentalism of basic values and basic norms. Lyotard’s response to Habermas, therefore, is entitled Postmodernism for Children and presents itself as a collection of letters put together by editors who want to protect the author against the “reproach of irrationalism, neoconservatism, intellectual terrorism, simple-minded liberalism, nihilism, and cynism.”9 On the whole, the letters suggest that we seem to have entered a “phase of slackening.” Many symptoms indicate this, as for instance, the writings of a thinker of repute (that is, Habermas) who wants to defend the uncompleted project of modernity against neoconservatives by opening the way to a unity of experience. In his later writings, especially in The Differend,10 Lyotard moves away from any attempt to construe postmodernism as a completely new manner of life and thought and eliminates any traces of a progressive, revolutionary, Utopian, or anarchistic, that is, modern conception of postmodernism that his earlier writings might still bear.11
The main thing Habermas did in response to the postmodern critique of reason and rationality was to construe a new metanarrative of emancipatory reason which attempts to set things right and also to assign the French critics their proper position. He admits that it was mainly the challenge from the other side of the Rhine that motivated him to reconstruct the “philosophical discourse of modernity” in a book of the same title.12 In this new metanarrative, Habermas mobilizes the entirety of modern philosophy from a Germano-centered perspective. The heroes of this epic are Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Habermas. Their detractors form the “line” from the romantics to Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Dadaists, Foucault, and Derrida. Horkheimer and Adorno played into their hands but distinguished themselves from totalized scepticism by adopting from Walter Benjamin an attitude called “hopeless hope.” Max Weber’s theme of an independent logic of value spheres such as science, morality, and art provides the structure of this tale, and its content is the relentless drive for self-assurance on the part of modernity.
The beginning in this journey of the modern spirit is Kant, who “installed reason in the supreme seat of judgment before which anything that made a claim to validity had to be justified” (DM, 18). Through his three critiques, Kant subdivided reason into the faculties of theoretical reason (Critique of Pure Reason), practical reason (Critique of Practical Reason), and aesthetic judgment (Critique of Judgment) and thereby established special courts for the three cultural spheres of philosophy and metaphysics, morality and law, and aesthetics and poetics. Such a division grounded all these three spheres in rational foundations of their own. Yet Kant did not perceive these differentiations as completely different tracks without any relationship to one another, as “diremptions.” He therefore only introduced the modern spirit, which for Habermas is inspired by the need for a deeper foundation, an “ideal intrinsic form,” that is entirely derived from the spirit of modernity and not imposed upon it from outside (DM, 19–20). We must therefore turn to Hegel, who in reality was the first to raise the detachment of modernity from founding and external norms to the levels of a philosophical problem (DM, 16). With him the need for “self-reassurance of modernity” comes to such a head that it becomes the “fundamental problem of his own philosophy” (DM, 16). Hegel discovered the principle of modernity as a “structure of self-relation,” a full deployment of all human potentialities, and called this principle subjectivity (DM, 16).
In the principle of subjectivity, all autonomous spheres of the modern world appear to be gathered in a focal point. However, Hegel’s concept of “absolute knowledge” remains encircled in subjectivity and no longer permits a critique of subjectivity from any external position (DM, 34). Hegel’s notion of the absolute has the advantage of comprehending modernity in terms of its own principle (DM, 36), but this solution does not completely satisfy because the critique of subjectivity (modernity) can be carried out “only within the framework of the philosophy of the subject” (DM, 41). Such philosophizing obliterates the intrinsic tensions of modernity and does not fully meet the need for self-assurance. The unrest and movement of modernity therefore explode this concept at the moment of its conception (DM, 41).
Hegel’s disciples freed the critique of modernity from the burden of the Hegelian concept of reason (DM, 53), but maintained the task of a self-assurance of modernity (DM, 58). Marx transformed the concept of reflection to the concept of production and replaced self-consciousness with labor (DM, 59). With Nietzsche and his followers, a new discourse enters the scene, no longer willing to hold on to the principle of reason in the critique of modernity, but taking critique out of the hands of reason and striking “the subjective genitive from the phrase ‘critique of reason’” (DM, 59). From now on, whichever name philosophy assumes in this tradition—fundamental ontology (Heidegger), critique or negative dialectics (Adorno), deconstruction (Derrida), or genealogy (Foucault)—these pseudonyms for Habermas are only “the cloak for a scantily concealed end of philosophy” (DM, 53). With its professed “antihumanism,” this tradition constitutes the “real challenge” for Habermas and his discourse of modernity. Before Habermas can investigate “what lies hidden behind the radical gestures of this challenge,” however, he has to conduct a closer inspection of the type of antireason represented by his father figures, Horkheimer and Adorno.
Such an examination appears all the more important because the contemporary French interpretation of Nietzsche has brought about moods and attitudes confusingly similar to those conjured up by Horkheimer and Adorno, and Habermas would like “to forestall this confusion” (DM, 106). What appears to be the particular mark of these two representatives of the Frankfurt School in contrast to their French counterparts in the critique of reason is their use of Benjamin’s “hope of the hopeless,” or their own “now paradoxical labor of conceptualization” (DM, 106). To put it in different terms, they realized only too well the injuries caused by “instrumentalized” reason, the coercion of systematized conceptual thought, and the pretensions of utopian reconciliations. Yet they maintained Hegelian wholeness and integrity in the structural patterns of their thought by lamenting its absence and unrealizability as a lack, a loss, a deficiency and not, as in poststructuralist and postmodern thought, as the appropriate human condition. They suffered from this situation and increased their suffering by insisting on a critique of reason through reason, and by not giving in to a prerational, supra-rational, or transsubjective, but in any event irrational, lapse into myth as Nietzsche and his French followers have done according to Habermas.
The resistance to myth is so strong for Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas claims, that it forms a central motif in their critique of the Enlightenment.13 As a matter of fact, this critique can be summarized as the “thesis of a secret complicity” of myth and enlightenment, in that “myth is already enlightenment” and “enlightenment reverts to mythology” (DM, 107). The prime example of this “entwinement” is Homer’s Odyssey, interpreted by Horkheimer and Adorno as the “primal history of subjectivity” (DM, 108), the epic anticipation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This “myth of origin” depicts the double meaning of emancipation, of “springing from,” namely, “a shudder at being uprooted and a sigh of relief at escaping.” The “cunning of Odysseus” represents the modern mentality of buying off the curse of vengeful powers by offering vicarious victims (DM, 108). The song of the Sirens recalls for Odysseus a “happiness once guaranteed by the ‘fluctuating interrelationship with nature,’” but he has this experience only “as one who already knows himself in chains” (DM, 109). Similarly, the process of enlightenment in the modern age has not resulted in liberation, but in a world upon which rests “the curse of demonic reification and deadly isolation.” The permanent sign of the Enlightenment for Horkheimer and Adorno is “domination over an objectified external nature and a repressed internal nature” (DM, 110).
In less image-laden language we could say that for Horkheimer and Adorno, the result of the Enlightenment for the sciences is an instrumentalized type of reason solely based on technical utility; for morality and law, ethical scepticism unable to distinguish morality from immorality; and for aesthetics, mass culture that fuses art with entertainment (DM, 111–12). Altogether, reason is stripped of all “validity claim and assimilated to sheer power” (DM, 112). For Habermas, however, Horkheimer and Adorno’s “critique of instrumental reason” is an amazing leveling of cultural modernity that does not do justice to what Weber had called its “stubborn differentiation of value spheres” (DM, 112). Habermas refers to the “specific theoretical dynamic that continually pushes the sciences,” the “universalistic foundations of law and morality” in democratic will formation as well as in individual identity formation, and the “productivity and explosive power of basic aesthetic experiences” (DM, 113). The Dialectic of the Enlightenment is therefore an “odd book,” the “blackest book” by Horkheimer and Adorno, and “we no longer share this mood, this attitude” (DM, 106). Considering the desolate emptiness of emancipation depicted by these authors, the reader, Habermas claims, correctly gets the feeling that this leveling presentation “failed to notice essential characteristics of cultural modernity” (DM, 114).
To illustrate Horkheimer and Adorno’s extremism, Habermas concentrates on a single aspect in their critique of reason, namely, ideology critique. Since Marx, ideology critique has continued the process of the enlightenment and self-assurance of modernity by unmasking remnant mythological components in theoretical constructs supposedly free from any ensnarement in myth (DM, 115). Ideology critique had been especially successful in uncovering the “inadmissible mixture of power and validity” and for the first time had made enlightened reason entirely reflective, that is, a performance on its own products—theories (DM, 116). Ideology critique had never been entirely negative about its subject matters but was able to decipher in misused ideas “a piece of extant reason hidden from itself,” or in other words, “surplus forces of productivity” (DM, 117–18). With Horkheimer and especially Adorno, ideology critique attained a “second-order of reflectiveness” and turned against its own foundations (DM, 116). Critique became total and retained nothing it could refer to as a standard. Adorno was fully aware of the “performative contradiction inherent in a totalized critique,” but also convinced that we have to remain in its circle (DM, 119).
One option for a “critique that attacks the presuppositions of its own validity” is what Habermas considers to be Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s doctrine of the will to power. In its regressiveness, this option breaks out of the horizon of modernity and is bottomless as theory, because of the suspension of any distinction between power claims and truth claims (DM, 127). Horkheimer and Adorno’s option was to shun theory and to “practice determinate negation on an ad hoc basis,” standing firm against any fusion of reason and power in an “uninhibited scepticism” (DM, 128–29). Habermas’s own solution, as he argued against Horkheimer and Adorno, “is to leave at least one rational criterion intact for their explanation of the corruption of all rational criteria” (DM, 127). This criterion is to be found in the “communicating community of researchers,” in a “mediating kind of thinking,” in “argumentative discourse,” and is essentially “the unforced force of the better argument” (DM, 130). It is hard to comprehend, however, how this principle of communicative, argumentative discourse escapes the “totalized” critique of basic standards, norms, and values that Habermas deplores so vividly. By holding on to this principle of criticism and by declaring one argument “better” than the other, Habermas seems to break off critical discourse and to posit himself and his followers into the position of those who simply know better or, to borrow words from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, into the community of those who know themselves to be the knowing ones.14
To summarize the dispute, we could say that Habermas makes a desperate effort to reaffirm the modern position of rational enlightenment and progress, whereas Lyotard has crossed the bridge to a postmodern phase in which such concerns are simply smiled at. This is basically how Richard Rorty sees the positions of the two parties. Habermas is holding on to the metanarrative of emancipation, branding scepticism of absolutes as relativism, whereas Lyotard is quite happy with relativism, historicism, and the narratives of the smaller sort, seeing no necessity to ground them in an absolute foundation. Rorty says: “To accuse postmodernism of relativism is to try to put a metanarrative in the postmodern’s mouth. One will do this if one identifies ‘holding a philosophical position’ with having a metanarrative available. If we insist on such a definition of ‘philosophy,’ then postmodernism is post-philosophical. But it would be better to change the definition.”15
Yet Rorty by no means takes his own position simply on the side of Lyotard’s sceptical postmodernism. He distances himself equally from both Habermas’s totalitarian foundationalism and Lyotard’s elusive cynicism. Instead, he maintains a matter-of-fact pragmatism of small solutions and relative decisions which can, however, be seen as a new and interesting configuration of the postmodern stance. What he objects to in the new French narrative told by Foucault, Lyotard, and the like is not so much the naive image of science implied in these texts (HL, 33),16 or a secret, hidden fascination with the German tale about the “self-assurance” of modern society (HL, 39), but a complete detachment from any human and social concern, the attitude of supposedly dispassionate observation, writing without a human face, the lack of formulas using “we” in these texts, and the absence of any rhetoric of emancipation in this style (HL, 40). This is a “remoteness” for Rorty which is reminiscent of the “conservative who pours cold water on hopes for reform, who affects to look at the problems of his fellow-citizens with the eye of the future historian” (HL, 41). Whereas Habermas appears to be inspired by foundationalist fervor, these French texts emanate a “dryness” which is too aloof from any type of “concrete social engineering.” Rorty certainly agrees with Lyotard that “studies of the communicative competence of a transhistorical subject are of little use in reinforcing our sense of identification with our community,” but he still insists on “the importance of that sense” (HL, 41).
With regard to Habermas’s demand for “communicative competence” as the one valid standard for rational critique after all other standards have broken down, Rorty thinks that this does not really solve the problem. According to him, “there is no way for the citizens of Brave New World to work their way out from their happy slavery by theory,” since everything they sense as rational or as “undistorted communication” will already be in accordance with their desires. Rorty says, “There is no way for us to prove to ourselves that we are not happy slaves of this sort, any more than to prove that our life is not a dream” (HL, 35). He is particularly amused by Habermas’s belief in the “internal theoretical dynamic” of the sciences that supposedly propels them “beyond the creation of technologically exploitable knowledge,” which he sees not so much as “theoretical dynamic” but as “social practice,” something to be derived from the “social virtues of the European bourgeoisie” or simply from “theoretical curiosity.” That view would take away from science the false appearance of an “ahistorical teleology” and make modern science look more like “something which a certain group of human beings invented in the same sense in which these same people can be said to have invented Protestantism, parliamentary government, and Romantic poetry” (HL, 36).
As to the three cultural spheres of science, morality, and art and the need for their unification in a common ground, Rorty thinks that these are artificial problems created by taking Kant and Hegel too seriously. Once one has started this division, however, the overcoming of the split will haunt one as the “fundamental philosophical problem” and result in “an endless series of reductionist and anti-reductionist moves”:
Reductionists will try to make everything scientific (“positivism”), or political (Lenin), or aesthetic (Baudelaire, Nietzsche). Anti-reductionists will show what such attempts leave out. To be a philosopher of the “modern” sort is precisely to be unwilling either to let these spheres simply co-exist uncompetitively, or to reduce the other two to the remaining one. Modern philosophy has consisted in forever realigning them, squeezing them together, and forcing them apart again. But it is not clear that these efforts have done the modern age much good (or, for that matter, harm). (HL, 37)
As is obvious from these observations, Rorty puts Habermas into the modern camp and attributes to himself a postmodern position. His postmodernism, however, goes beyond mere scepticism toward metanarratives and extends to practical attitudes in the art of living and thinking, such as theoretical curiosity or an “intellectual analogue of civic virtue—tolerance, irony, and a willingness to let spheres of culture flourish without worrying too much about their ‘common ground,’” and so on (HL, 38). He thinks that Habermas “is scratching where it does not itch” (HL, 34), and that his story of modern philosophy is “both too pessimistic and too German” (HL, 38–39). Rorty would arrange the story of the modern age in a different way and construe it, for example, as “successive attempts to shake off the sort of ahistorical structure exemplified by Kant’s division of culture into three ‘value-spheres’” (HL, 39). Yet he would also refrain from telling his story the French way, in the dry manner Foucault and Lyotard are relating it, that is, completely detached from any interest in humanity and any identity with our community (HL, 40–41).
Rorty’s type of story could just as well assume the shape of a combination of the two narratives. This story would not unmask in the German manner a “power called ‘ideology’ in the name of something not created by power called ‘validity’ or ‘emancipation,’” but would simply explain in the French manner “who was currently getting and using power for what purposes.” But unlike the French narrative, Rorty’s story would also suggest how some other people might get power and “use it for other purposes” (HL, 41–42). The value of “undistorted communication” would clearly be recognized, but the need for a “theory of communicative competence as backup” could be dismissed (HL, 41). Another way of arranging the story for Rorty would be to minimize the importance of the “canonical sequence of philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche” and to consider this tradition as a “distraction from the history of concrete social engineering which made the contemporary North Atlantic culture what it is now.” Rorty also suggests creating “a new canon” based on an “awareness of new social and religious and institutional possibilities” instead of “developing a new dialectical twist in metaphysics and epistemology” (HL, 41). “That would be a way of splitting the difference between Habermas and Lyotard, of having things both ways,” he says. “We could agree with Lyotard that we need no more metanarratives, but with Habermas that we need less dryness” (HL, 41). Yet Rorty’s postmodernism comes forth best in terms of John Dewey’s philosophy, in taking seriously “Dewey’s suggestion that the way to re-enchant the world, to bring back what religion gave our forefathers, is to stick to the concrete” (HL, 42), and he concludes, “Those who want beautiful social harmonies want a postmodernist form of social life, in which society as a whole asserts itself without bothering to ground itself” (HL, 43).
In his response to this criticism, Habermas did not go much beyond the position he had already taken, and while recognizing the “pluralization of diverging discourses” in the modern age (QC, 192),17 he held on to the “unity of reason, even if only in a procedural sense,” and to a “transcending validity claim that goes beyond merely local contexts” (QC, 193). Differences in opinion are expressed in the expectation of “future resolutions” (QC, 194). Basic for Habermas in these argumentations is the distinction “between valid and socially accepted views, between good arguments and those which are merely successful for a certain audience at a certain time” (QC, 194). To take a position of yes or no is more for him than to acknowledge the “claims of merely influential ideas” (QC, 195). There is, rather, a basic interest for philosophy, for philosophy’s role as “guardian of reason,” to see social practices of justification “as more than just such practices” (QC, 195). While preserving for philosophy the “possibility of speaking of rationality in the singular,” Habermas also wants a “concept of communicative rationality” that does not fall prey to the “totalizing and self-referential critique of reason” in the postmodern manner, be this “via Heidegger to Derrida” or “via Bataille to Foucault.” He finds this type of rationality in the “everyday practice of communication” (QC, 196) and believes that “the socially integrative powers of the religious tradition shaken by enlightenment can find an equivalent in the unifying, consensus-creating power of reason” (QC, 197).
Viewed from the radical critique of reason in the postmodern manner, these arguments are of course more desirabilities, or what Habermas considers to be desirabilities, than demonstrative truths. To give these thoughts more profile, however, we should add that Habermas’s “unifying, consensus-creating power of reason” is not to be taken in the sense of a stable, ideal, transcendental, or in any other way identifiable and objectifiable principle of metaphysics of presence. Communicative reason manifests itself through basic differences among the communicating partners, through endless argumentations and counter-argumentations, and leads to no enduring, everlasting result. The consensus-creating power of reason, in other words, constantly creates itself and is never fully realized. With its claim to validity, communicative reason transcends the present, but this transcendence is never absolutely accomplished and permanently renews itself. The presence of truth is indefinitely deferred. Yet in spite of all these delays and postponements, we are not yet out of Hegelianism. Reason and truth remain the centering ground and determine social discourse structurally and historically. With this model of thought, Habermas reaffirms and continues the “project of modernity” while leaving the territory of postmodernity to Rorty and others, not without warning, however, that this is a dangerous philosophical zone of performative contradictions and self-referential traps.
Other proponents of postmodernism see the end of modernity in organic images of aging, decay, and natural death. Jean Baudrillard describes the process as one of an immense loss of meaning leading to complete indifference, in a state where an obese growth of the same has replaced the innovative élan toward the new. “We are truly in a beyond,” Baudrillard says:
The imagination is in power, likewise the enlightenment and the intelligence, and we are experiencing now or in the near future the perfection of the social. Everything has been accomplished, the heaven of utopia has come down to earth, and what once stood out in a shining perspective, now appears as catastrophe in slow motion. We already sense the fatal taste of the material paradise. And transparency, in the age of alienation an expression of the ideal order, is fulfilled today in the form of a homogeneous and terrorist space.18
Gianni Vattimo sees the “end of modernity” in more academic manner as an “ontological decay,” an erosion of principles such as subject, being, or truth. He attempts to provide an art of living for the late-modern and postmodern types of existence which have left behind any recourse to finality and presence, as far postponed as these consolations might ever be. The inspiration for this manner of existence derives from a very personally appropriated Nietzsche in the style of Human, All Too Human or a Heidegger understood as initiation into death.19
Although he does not use terms such as modernism and postmodernism, because of their determining, binding character, the style of postmodern writing and the reflective, ironic mode of postmodern thinking is performed at its best in the texts of Jacques Derrida. Here, the end of modernity, or better, the infinite transgression of modernity, is not declared by a statement but enacted through performative writing and communicated indirectly. Casual remarks such as the following are the most direct statements on postmodernism by Derrida, but altogether atypical for his style: “If modernism distinguishes itself through a striving for absolute domination, postmodernism is perhaps the statement or experience of its end, the end of this plan for domination.”20 However, one should always keep in mind that pluralism, polysemy, and difference are for Derrida no loss of unity (past history), nor a momentary lack of coherence to be overcome (future), but the character of linguisticity itself (present), and therefore attributable to all periods in history. The phenomenon of postmodernism is thereby raised to a truly theoretical and philosophical level, and the critique of reason, the decisive mark of postmodernism, is carried out, not from a temporary perspective or some disciplinary point of view, but as a genuine philosophical task.
Among the various texts by Derrida, none is perhaps more exemplary for his style of postmodern writing and postmodern thought than the small composition, Of a Recently Adopted Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy.21 The text cannot be reduced to the postmodern debate but certainly articulates aspects of it, although in an entirely indirect, casual manner. It is Derrida’s response, his ironic account of and disarming contribution to a colloquium devoted to his work, more precisely, to his position concerning “the ends of man.”22
The end of man is a prominent theme in contemporary thought and closely connected with the death of the subject, the disappearance of subjectivity as the last grounding principle of modernity in its desire for self-assurance. What appeared to be the final basis of our structures of knowledge, moral, social, and political activities, and aesthetic creations as well as enjoyments, that is, human reality, transcendental subjectivity, becomes involved in a bewildering sort of questioning and appears to be predetermined by supraindividual and transsubjective constellations of power. These predeterminations devaluate the seemingly primary principle of subjectivity to a completely secondary entity, an incidental effect in the discursive formation of epochs, a predetermined glance at the world which is codified by preestablished sequences in the mobile system of signs, discourses, institutions, and canons. The critical doubt that the human level might not be the ultimate reality for evaluations of a broader scope goes hand in hand with the Nietzschean impulse to leave behind the “anthropomorphic” point of view and to transcend merely humanistically based value judgments in the style of the “human, all too human.” It is from such considerations that Foucault formulated at the end of The Order of Things his famous phrase about the erasing of man who disappears “like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.”23 No other topic of postmodern thought has aroused more indignation than this proclamation of the end of man.
In a subtle configuration of the two meanings of the word end, goal and death, Derrida suggests through his title “The Ends of Man” that it might very well be the end (goal, destination, aim, term) of man to reach his end, and this again in a multiplicity of senses: his completion, his telos, his self-overcoming, his abolition, extinction, and death.24 Who could deny this ultimate task? Some of the greatest philosophers of the modern age, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, not to mention Nietzsche, were deeply immersed in this thought but also demonstrated the inachievability of such an enterprise, the necessity and impossibility of thinking and experiencing the “end” of man. The thinking of limit and the thinking of goal always get in each other’s way in such fundamental thought and reveal the more basic fact that the “name of man has always been inscribed in metaphysics between these two ends” (EM, 123). Indeed, Derrida continues, the end of man in this double-edged sense, has “since always” been prescribed “in the thinking and the language of Being” in the West, and “this prescription has never done anything but modulate the equivocality of the end, in the play of telos and death” (EM, 134). To bring this interplay to its full fruition, Derrida suggests reading the sequence in the following way by taking all words in all their senses: “the end of man is the thinking of Being, man is the end of the thinking of Being, the end of man is the end of the thinking of Being.” As an afterthought he adds: “Man, since always, is his proper end, that is, the end of his proper. Being, since always, is its proper end, that is, the end of its proper” (EM, 134).
This double-edged position concerning the ends of man motivated the conference on the same theme, and when Derrida gave a speech entitled Of a Recently Adopted Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy, he had to raise his irony of telos and thanatos to even higher powers, now including his own apocalyptic-eschatological tone of philosophy.25 In its title the text is a parody of Kant’s essay of 1796, “Of a Recently Adopted Superior Tone in Philosophy,” where Kant protests against writers in philosophy who departed from the logical and demonstrative type of reasoning and claimed to have access to truth through a supernatural kind of revelation, through an “eschatological mystagogy.” Authors whom Kant had particularly in mind were Schlosser and Jacobi. Schlosser, known for his mysticism and visionary enthusiasm, had received the name of “the new German Orpheus” from his contemporaries, and was referred to as “the ominous voice of the orphie sage.”26 Jacobi was notorious for his opposition to the speculative manner of reasoning in the style of transcendental idealism. Since he attempted to supplement philosophical speculation with an immediate revelation within the inner self, a direct and unmediated access to truth through personal intimation, his philosophy, in an anticipation of Kierkegaard, became known as the “philosophy of the leap,” the philosophy of the salto, which for some, of course, was a salto mortale into the abyss of divinity.27
It was against these authors and also against anyone else in his time who embroidered philosophy with poetry and non-rational argumentations that Kant assumed the attitude of rational enlightenment, of the “police in the realm of the sciences” (TA, 31), and warned against the castration, the annihilation, and the death of all true philosophy through such transgressions (TA, 21). Writers such as Schlosser and Jacobi put themselves outside of the community of human beings by considering themselves as privileged, as an elite, and in possession of some mysterious secret which they alone are able to reveal (TA, 28–29). These authors confront the “voice of reason” with the “voice of an oracle” (TA, 30). They believe that work is useless in philosophy and that it would suffice to lend an ear to an oracle inside oneself (TA, 32). Borrowing the revelatory vocabulary used by his adversaries, Kant characterizes them as “approaching the goddess of wisdom so closely that they perceive the rustling of her robe,” or as “making the veil of Isis so thin that one can surmise under it the goddess” (TA, 44).
Without pointing it out continuously, Derrida indicates sufficiently that what Kant has to say about the “mystagogues” and the death of philosophy in his time can easily be applied to our contemporary writers on postmodernity. In a certain way, Derrida mimes Kant’s text, but he also parodies it and thereby transforms, deforms it (TA, 17). On the one hand, he seems to assume the attitude of one who warns us in the name of rational enlightenment against the death of all true philosophy, but on the other, he casts grave doubts on the credibility of such an endeavor. These doubts arise even from the general framework in which this story is presented, the Enlightenment. We are immediately reminded that the entire structure of the Enlightenment, of the siècle des lumières, rests on attempts to reveal or uncover, and that the great monument of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, has as its frontispiece an engraving depicting the unveiling of truth. We might even think that a project as serious as that of the self-assurance of modernity might result from a desire as frivolous as the lifting of the veil of Iris. Derrida does not go into these broader aspects but stays with Kant and points out that the voice of trembling astonishment, otherwise criticized as the secret of mystagogues, also animates Kant’s moral law (TA, 36), that his entire discourse, perhaps every discourse, is located on either side, that of the Enlightenment and that of mystagogy, and that this also applies to our own modernity (TA, 53).
Like Kant, Derrida seems to assume the task of demystifying the grandseigneurial tone of an approaching end and to maintain the vigilant attitude of rational enlightenment. He seems to be inspired by a “desire of clarity and revelation to demystify or, if you prefer, to deconstruct the apocalyptic discourse itself, and together with it, everything that speculates about vision, imminence of the end, theophany, parousia, and final judgment” (TA, 64–65). Yet such deconstruction has to mobilize a great number and variety of interpretative devices and never functions without a second step, which in this case, gets involved in the finest particularities of the apocalyptic tone itself (TA, 66). Concentrating on St. John’s Apocalypse, the prototype of any apocalyptical discourse, Derrida discovers one essential feature of such texts: “One no longer knows very well who in the Apocalypse lends his voice and tone to someone else, one no longer knows very well who addresses what to whom” (TA, 77). It is by no means certain that the human being is the “terminal of this endless computer.” However, the question arises whether this “angelic structure,” this reference to other references without decidable origin and destination, is not the scene of writing in general. Derrida asks, “Is the apocalyptic not a transcendental condition of every discourse, even of every experience, of every mark or of every trace?” (TA, 77–78). The task of demystifying thereby reveals itself as twofold. On the one hand, it is a task in the style of the Enlightenment and as such without limits (TA, 81). On the other, demystification in the style of deconstruction remains open to features in the apocalyptic discourse that transcend the realm of ontological, grammatical, linguistic, or semantic knowledge (TA, 93).
This realm opens up, for instance, in the apocalyptic “Come” (erkhou, veni) which neither comes from nor addresses itself to an identifiable, verifiable, decidable, or derivable determination. And it is here that we gather the “truth” about the apocalypse: “an apocalypse without apocalypse; an apocalypse without vision, without truth, without revelation, dispatches (because the ‘Come’ is plural in itself), addresses without message and destination, without decidable sender or receiver . . .” (TA, 95). To put it more pointedly, there is no chance for a type of thinking that wants to reveal a final truth in a final discourse of revelation. But what about the “truth” of this truth, the “truth” about the apocalypse? It is precisely here, at the breaching of the limits of communication, that postmodern thinking and writing begin to operate through circumlocution, indirectness, configuration, and ironic communication.
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 61.
2. Michel Foucault, “Um welchen Preis sagt die Vernunft die Wahrheit?—Ein Gespräch,” Spuren-Zeitschrift für Kunst und Gesellschaft nos. 1–2 (1983):7.
3. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984): 53–92. See also Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983); and Heinrich Klotz, ed., Postmodern Visions: Drawings, Paintings, and Models by Contemporary Architects (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985).
4. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 32–34.
5. Christa Bürger, “Das Verschwinden der Kunst: Die Postmoderne-Debatte in den USA,” in Postmoderne: Alltag, Allegorie und Avantgarde, ed. Christa and Peter Bürger (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), 48–49.
6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979). References to this text are designated PC.
7. Some of these ideas are taken up and further developed in Jean-François Lyotard, Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1986).
8. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” trans. Seyla Ben-Habib, in Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic, 3–15. References to this text are designated M. For further discussions of the topic see Richard J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
9. Lyotard, Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, 3. The first section, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” is included in English translation in Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 71–82.
10. Jean-François Lyotard, Le différend (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1983). See also his “Grundlagenkrise,” Neue Hefte für Philosophie 26 (1986): 1–33.
11. See especially Jean-François Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: Union générale des éditions, 1973), and the concept of “désirévolution” in that text.
12. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). References to this text are designated DM.
13. See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
14. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 409.
15. Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” The Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 589.
16. Richard Rorty, “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,” Praxis International 4 (1984): 32–44. References to this text are designated HL.
17. Jürgen Habermas, “Questions and Counterquestions,” in Bernstein, Habermas and Modernity, 192–216. References to this text are designated QC.
18. Jean Baudrillard, Les stratégies fatales (Paris: Grasset, 1983), 85.
19. Gianni Vattimo, Al di là soggetto (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1985) and La fine della modernità (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1985).
20. Jacques Derrida and Eva Meyer, “Labyrinth und Archi/Textur,” in Das Abenteuer der Ideen: Architektur und Philosophie seit der industriellen Revolution (Berlin: Austellungskatalog, 1984), 94–106.
21. Jacques Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1983). Translations are my own. References to this text are designated TA.
22. Les fins de l’homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: Colloque de Cérisy, 23 juillet–2 août 1980 (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1981).
23. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1973), 387.
24. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 109–36. References to this text are designated EM.
25. See Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique, and The Ends of Man.
26. Friedrich Schlegel in his reviews of Schlosser, Studien zur Philosophie und Theologie, in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler (Paderborn-München: Schöningh, 1975), vol. 8, 3, 33.
27. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Open Letter to Fichte, 1799,” and “On Faith and Knowledge in Response to Schelling and Hegel,” trans. Diana I. Behler, in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1982), 119–57.