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Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in Marcuse's critical theory. This can be partly ascribed to Marcuse's interdisciplinary approach to humanities and social sciences. Many of Marcuse's ideas and concepts are tacitly present in contemporary social and ecological movements. Contemporary literature on Marcuse is positively inclined to his theory while the critique of Marcuse dates back to the '70s, and remains largely unimpaired. This fact poses significant challenges to the revival of Marcuse's critical theory. This study sets out to report on current interest in Marcuse's critical theory trying to correct "past injustices" by responding to negative criticism. The main flaw of such criticism - as we see it - is in failing to perceive interdisciplinary character of Marcuse's critical theory. Marcuse's renaissance cannot be complete without, to use dialectical term, sublating the history of negative criticism.
This paper analyzes two contemporary, „third-generation“ perspectives within critical theory - Nancy Fraser’s and Axel Honneth’s - with the aim of examining the degree to which the two authors succeed in grounding the normative criteria of social critique in the perspectives of ’ordinary’ social actors, as opposed to speculative social theory. To that end, the author focuses on the influential debate between Fraser and Honneth Redistribution or Recognition? which concerns the appropriate normative foundations of a „post-metaphysical“ critical theory, and attempts to reconstruct the fundamental 29 disagreements between Fraser and Honneth over the meaning and tasks of critical theory. The author concludes that both critical theorists ultimately secure the normative foundations of critique through substantive theorizations of the social, which frame the two authors’ „reconstructions“ of the normativity of everyday social action, but argues that post-metaphysical critical theory does not have to abandon comprehensive social theory in order to be epistmologically „non-authoritarian“.
Critique, and especially radical critique of reason, is under pressure from two opponents. Whereas the proponents of "post-critical" or "acritical" thinking denounce critique as an empty and self-righteous repetition of debunking, the decriers of "post-truth" accuse critique of having helped to bring about our current "post-truth" politics. Both advocate realism as a limit critique must respect, but Vogelmann defends the claim that we urgently need radical critiques of reason because they offer a more precise diagnosis of the untruths in politics the two opponents of critique are rightfully worried about. Radical critiques of reason are possible, he argues, if we turn our attention to the practices of criticizing, if we refrain from a sovereign epistemology, and if we pluralize reason without trivializing it. In order to demonstrate the diagnostic advantage of radical critiques of reason, he briefly analyzes the political and epistemic strategy at work in two exemplary untruths in politics.