Rejoinder to Richard Wolin

In his response to my essay, Richard Wolin remarks that the recent controversy over reason and unreason in contemporary philosophy has proved to be a rather sterile one. I would agree. But in my view it is Habermas's complaint the charges of aestheticism, cryptonormativism, nihilism, infantilism, wholesale rejection of reason and modern society levelled against poststructuralism which has largely been responsible for this sterility. Wolin reiterates Habermas's complaint in some of his earlier essays, where he writes of a diabolical pact connecting Foucault to Niklas Luhmann, of Foucault's defective Miindigkeit or immaturity, and of his dangerous and empty aesthetic decisionism. Wolin also adopts an even more dismissive attitude towards Derrida in these essays. After accusing me of psychologizing Habermas, Wolin simply repeats his complaint, which seems to me to compound the very sterility to which he objects. Wolin is willing to allow only specific limitations to Habermas's thought in discussion: he countenances no real questioning of it.'

Critical Theory and Philosophy · Philosophy