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Toward an Ethics of Fantasy: The Kantian Dialogues of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge

2010; Routledge; Volume: 85; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00168890.2010.522909

1930-6962

Richard Langston,

Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

In regular dialogue with one another since the early 1970s, sociologist Oskar Negt and author, filmmaker, and television producer Alexander Kluge have authored three volumes of social philosophy, in which they devote little if any attention to their dialogic method. By situating Negt and Kluge in contradistinction to Jürgen Habermas, this essay argues for Negt and Kluge's very different vision for critical theory after Theodor Adorno, one that intentionally steers clear of Habermas's investments in communication and discourse, but one that is nevertheless borne of intersubjective dialogue. Looking beyond the frame of their formal philosophy, this inquiry considers Negt and Kluge's many televised dialogues, in general, and their long-standing deliberations on Immanuel Kant, in particular, as meditations on their unique employ of dialogue as a paralinguistic means toward ethical ends. This ethics is for Negt and Kluge always a function of the quantity of fantastic labor a dialogue can evoke in minds of others who stand outside dialogue. How exactly dialogue triggers fantasy and, furthermore, how autonomous thought constitutes Negt and Kluge's ethics is the subject of this essay.