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Suffering Injustice: Misrecognition as Moral Injury in Critical Theory

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09672550500169117

1466-4542

J. M. Bernstein,

Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy

Abstract It is the persistence of social suffering in a world in which it could be eliminated that for Adorno is the source of the need for critical reflection, for philosophy. Philosophy continues and gains its cultural place because an as yet unbridgeable abyss separates the social potential for the relief of unnecessary human suffering and its emphatic continuance. Philosophy now is the culturally bound repository for the systematic acknowledgement and articulation of the meaning of the expanse of human suffering within technologically advanced societies that are already committed to liberal ideals of freedom and equality. Keywords: Critical TheorysufferinginjusticeHegelHabermasAdorno Notes 1 Jürgen Habermas, 'Rightness versus Truth: On the Sense of Normative Validity in Moral Judgments and Norms', in his Truth and Justification, trans. Barbara Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 248. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, 'Why Still Philosophy?', in his Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 14. 3 Four recent articles work up this thought from different angles: Espen Hammer, 'Adorno and Extreme Evil', Philosophy and Social Criticism, 26(4) (2000), pp.75–93; Deborah Cook, 'Ein Reaktionäres Schwein? Political Activism and Prospects for Change in Adorno', Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 63(227) (January 2004), pp. 47–67; Simon Jarvis, 'What is Speculative Thinking?' Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 63(227), pp. 69–83; and Lambert Zuidervaart, 'Metaphysics after Auschwitz: Suffering and Hope in Adorno's Negative Dialectics', forthcoming. The existence of this splendid set of essays means that in this essay I shall be able to concentrate on philosophical matters since so much of the hard work of textual analysis and interpretation has already been done. 4 For a potent critique of liberal justice along these lines see Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust (London: Verso, 1998). For an elaboration of the thesis that liberal justice, Kantian liberal universalism, has already internalized Hobbesian instrumentalism as its premise see my Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Ch. 3. 5 See, for example, Deborah Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society (London: Routledge, 2004);Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno's Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, Ethik nach Auschwitz: Adornos negative Moralphilosophie (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1993), and his 'Adorno's Negative Moral Philosophy', in Tom Huhn (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Ch. 13; and in the same volume, Ch. 12, Christoph Menke, 'Genealogy and Critique: Two Forms of Ethical Questioning of Morality'. 6 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 7 Quoted by Rolf Tiedemann in his 'Introduction' to Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. xviii–xix. 8 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), Part 2. 9 Axel Honneth, 'The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: Situating Critical Theory Today', in Peter Dews (ed.) Habermas: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 326. 10 Ibid., p. 324. 11 It should be acknowledged that the collapse in the authority of liberal ideals in democratic societies over the past twenty‐five years has made the business of once again elaborating them have more point than I would have imagined possible in 1968, say. But that reasonable task still should not be confused with the generation of a Critical Theory of society. 12 Honneth, 'The Social Dynamics of Disrespect', p. 328. Notice that the price Honneth must immediately pay for his theory of misrecognition is its divorce from the fundamental mechanisms of societal rationalization. The right thing to say here is that, post Marx and Weber, there is a systematic dislocation between social suffering and macro societal rationalization, and hence the hope of building a social theory in which the movement of the former became the route for the resolution of the latter – the classical model of revolutionary praxis – is now unavailable. 13 Ibid., p. 329. 14 Ibid. 15 The Struggle for Recognition, p. 135. 16 Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political‐Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke (London: Verso, 2003), p. 203. 17 Ibid., p. 204. 18 Ibid., p. 36. 19 For a pointed set of criticisms of Honneth's programme see Nikolas Kompridis, 'From Reason to Self‐Realization: On the "Ethical Turn" in Critical Theory', Critical Horizons, 5(1–2) (2004), pp. 323–60; reprinted in John Rundell et al. (eds) Contemporary Perspectives in Critical and Social Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 323–60. 20 Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 229; my italics. 21 Jürgen Habermas, 'The Debate on the Ethical Self‐Understanding of the Species', in his The Future of Human Nature, trans. Hella Beister and Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 33–4. 22 Ibid., p. 50. The idea of being a body and at the same time having a body – Leibsein und Körperhaben – is an idea Habermas borrows from Helmuth Plessner. 23 Ibid., p. 34. 24 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 26. In Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997), 'Introduction' and Ch. 4, Butler gives a first sketch of how 'words wound', that is, how our socially constituted independence and vulnerability are reiterated at the linguistic level. 25 'The Social Dynamics of Disrespect', p. 332. In 'A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory', trans. James Hebbeler, in Fred Rush (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Honneth states that the ethical core contained in the idea of Critical Theory is of a socially deficient rationality (pp.338–45). In that place, I cannot tell if Honneth is associating himself with that idea, or just recording it as a historical matter of fact. 26 'Progress', in Critical Models, p. 152. 27 'Adorno's Negative Moral Philosophy', p. 330. 28 Of course, I am not denying that in part 'the social pathologies of the present can be understood as the result of the inability of society to properly express the rational potential already inherent in its institutions, practices, and everyday routines' ('A Social Pathology of Reason', p. 340), only that, as will be evident directly, in purveying a formal theory of the good, Honneth cleanses present ideals of their implication in social pathology. Part of the reason that I find Marx's 'On the Jewish Question' so exemplary is that he there manages to continue the argument of the Philosophy of Right whilst simultaneously providing an immanent critique. This might just be a debate about how to identify 'societies' inabilities'. 29 Simon Jarvis, 'Adorno, Marx, Materialism', in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, pp. 88–9. 30 'Progress', p. 149. 31 When Marx urges that all rights are rights to inequality, he should not be interpreted as urging that no one should (need to) have rights (because in an ideal state of affairs they would not be necessary); his point is rather the dialectical one: that rights as they now are preserve the very lacks their possession promises – the right to vote as a continuation of disenfranchisement, the right to welfare as a way of keeping people impoverished. 32 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 27. 33 I have detailed this claim in my Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Ch. 8. 34 European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (1) (2002), pp. 5–85. 35 Ibid., p. 31. 36 Ibid., p. 51. 37 Ibid. 38 The Origins of Totalitarianism, Ch. 9. 39 Helmut Dubiel, 'The Remembrance of the Holocaust as a Catalyst for a Transnational Ethic?', New German Critique, 90 (Fall 2003), p. 70. Dubiel's fine essay draws from Alexander the same normative conclusion as I am promoting here.