Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects

✍ Scribed by Peter Uwe Hohendahl (editor); Jaimey Fisher (editor)

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 328
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The retirement of the distinguished philosopher Jürgen Habermas from his chair at the University of Frankfurt signalled an important caesura in the history of Critical Theory: the transition from the Habermasian project, to different forms of inquiry in the work of the next generation. This change-over happens at a time when it has become clear that Habermas's systematic exploration of communicative rationality has reached the point where both its achievements and its limitations had become evident. The essays collected in this volume address the problems connected with this transition, partly by returning to the insights of the first generation (Adorno and Benjamin), partly by focusing on questions raised by Habermas's work. Whatever the difference in the authors' positions, this collection gains its unity through their common interest in the significance and value of Critical Theory today and in its future as a philosophical project.

✦ Table of Contents

CONTENTS
Preface
Section I: Introduction
Chapter 1 From the Eclipse of Reason to Communicative Rationality and Beyond
Section II: Adorno and Benjamin: Reemerging Questions of Epistemology, History, and Aesthetics
Chapter 2 Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament
Chapter 3 Mega Melancholia: Adorno’s Minima Moralia
Chapter 4 Stumbling Into Modernity: Body and Soma in Adorno
Chapter 5 Aesthetic Politics Today: Walter Benjamin and Post-Fordist Culture
Section III: In the Wake of Jürgen Habermas: Communicative Reason, Morality, and History
Chapter 6 Critique and Self-Reflection: The Problematization of Morality
Chapter 7 Dialogical Rationality and the Critique of Absolute Autonomy
Chapter 8 Civil Society in the Information Age: Beyond the Public Sphere
Chapter 9 Between Rights and Hospitality: Cosmopolitan Democracy, Nation, and Cultural Identity
Chapter 10 A Question of Grounding: Reconstruction and Strict Reflexion in Habermas and Apel
Section IV: A Contemporary Challenge to Critical Theory: Systems Theory
Chapter 11 Critical Theory and Systems Theory
Chapter 12 Observations on Observations: Some Remarks on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
Section V: Epilogue
Chapter 13 Normativity and its Limits: Toward a Residual Ethics in Critical Theory
Bibliography
Index