Abstract
Of all the theoretical positions that arose from the 1970s left-wing academic upsurge, none caused more debate than postmodernism.
The liquidation of tragedy confirms the abolition of the individual.
Horkheimer and Adorno
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Notes
- 1.
The among intellectual historians has often been to divide grand philosophical personae into periods. Usually, such temporal shifts indict philosophers as never punctual: Foucault is either early or late, so too is Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, etc. In the case of Foucault, the distinct periods of his work seem to revolve around differing degrees of emphases on domination and resistance. Most of his early works—from the cornerstone The Order of Things (1966) to Discipline and Punish—stress the almost totalitarian nature of modern, or rational, forms of social control; his later works—the three volumes of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976), The Use of Pleasure (1984), The Care of the Self (1984) and the newly published 1975–1976 lectures on war, Society Must Be Defended—still centre on this theme, but stress the possibility of action within circumscribed discursive regimes.
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Hoy dispelled accusations that Foucault was against reason by pointing to later comments in which the philosopher said it is impossible to be against reason. Thomas McCarthy, in his rejoinder to Hoy’s argument, tended to disagree with this analysis of Foucault. To McCarthy, the similarities between Foucault and post-Weberian critical social theory were striking. Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas all agreed that rationalisation brought with it a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ rather than ‘unmitigated progress’. Yet to McCarthy the ‘real differences with Foucault concern whether there is at all a positive side to the story, an emancipatory dimension of enlightenment’. After a brief elaboration, McCarthy came up with a predictably Habermasian answer: no—although with a bit of ontological tweaking Foucault could make a good Critical Theorist (Hoy and McCarthy 1994: 224-230).
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Prosser, H. (2020). Reconciling Dialectic of Enlightenment with Postmodernism. In: Dialectic of Enlightenment in the Anglosphere . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3521-5_8
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