HONNETH, the famous German theorist of recognition who took over the legacy of the Frankfurt School and especially of Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Rancière, the eminent French thinker of the disagreement (mésentente) who broke with the Althusserian tradition, are two central figures in the contemporary intellectual landscape. Their thinking is located in two different traditions, but both deal with the heritage of Marxism, which they both consider in a highly critical way. Both thinkers have interest in specific areas inside and outside of philosophy. Both share a common concern for the political. However, while Axel Honneth approaches the political through arguments from social philosophy, moral philosophy, and philosophy of law and extensively refers to the social sciences, Jacques Rancière, for his part, turns to aesthetics and literature. A confrontation between these two influential modes of practicing critical thinking seems highly overdue. It is important for the field of contemporary critical theory to establish whether the paradigms Honneth and Rancière put forward to criticize contemporary society, to account for its evolution and for the transformations that can make it more just, are competing, whether they are mutually exclusive, or whether they are somehow compatible. To date, however, apart from a few studies conducted almost a decade ago, such a confrontation has still not really taken place.To this effect, a meeting was organized in June 2009 in Frankfurt am Main, in the historical building of the Institute for Social Research. Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière initiated a discussion—moderated by the German Philosopher Christoph Menke—around the key theses of their best-known books, The Struggle for Recognition and Disagreement. 2 Each thinker began by “reconstructing” the theoretical position of his interlocutor. This issued in a debate on the underlying principles of the “critical theory” that each represents, a clarification of their methodological approaches to society and politics, and, finally, a discussion of the possibility of overcoming injustice and of a political transformation of society. Indeed, their discussion centered on the very meaning of “critical theory.” It is a specific task of this volume to help elucidate this meaning. This book is the result of this short and intense encounter between the two thinkers. What is published here are the texts presented by Honneth and Rancière, the theoretical exchange that took place between them, and a supplementary text from each author intended to provide a deeper understanding of their thinking, their theoretical orientations, and their methods. Honneth’s method has a strong Hegelian spirit. It is marked by a specific way of discussing political issues—and here, more specifically, the political concept of freedom—through an approach he refers to as “social philosophy,” that is to say, a philosophical type of analysis that takes society as an object and relies on the results of the social sciences. Rancière’s method is a radical political questioning based on the principle whereby the social order is contested by any act that presupposes the equality of anyone with anyone and that verifies it (a “method of equality”). I believe that the short yet substantive discussions between the two thinkers represent a model and an excellent starting point for comparative studies into the possible ways of exercising social criticism, and that such comparative work is particularly apt to develop fruitful perspective onto many significant theoretical issues. Each of these practices shows important deficits in the other approach. One focuses on the need to transform society by the advent of social orders of recognition, the other on the affirmation of politics, assuming the irreversible division of the social. Thinking this divergence enlightens the reference to a critical approach in a large sense. This introduction discusses the texts published in this volume, and frames the confrontation between the two authors in relation to the main coordinates of their thinking. Jean-Philippe Deranty’s discussion, by contrast, takes a broader focus and seeks to situate the two models in the overall theoretical landscape, highlighting problems and potentials that each of the two models raises in relation to the general project of a philosophical critique of contemporary society. A substantive bibliography with a specific focus on the confrontation between the “German” and the “French” traditions is provided at the end of the volume to assist students and researchers in comparative studies in critical theory.
TWO CRITICAL THEORISTS?
While Honneth refers to the concept of freedom and Rancière uses equality as his central concept, both authors share the same fundamental concerns: they both question contemporary societies by asking about the conditions of justice. They both develop tools that are intended to help us understand the social mechanism that prevents the realization of justice and develop a theory to overcome injustice. Indeed, if we consider the appellation “critical theory” in a very broad sense, both authors can be linked to this tradition. But what is a point of connection between them is also a problem or a set of problems.
Criticism is understood not only in the sense of Kant—that of establishing the conditions of possibility of knowledge—but also in the sense of Marx, namely, as the articulation between theory and practice. It refers at the same time to the act of dispelling illusions that are constitutive of particular social conditions through the constitution of an emancipatory knowledge and to the thinking of the conditions of a free praxis. The critical tradition is not a unified or univocal tradition. Even in the narrow sense of what was retrospectively called the “Frankfurt School,” it is complex: the succession of generations of thinkers is marked by forms of heritage and rupture, appropriations or actualizations that distort and displace the original theory in productive ways. Critical theory was initially the Marxist-inspired method reformulated by Horkheimer in the 1930s, around which he gathered the members of the Institute of Social Research (the members of what is called the “first generation” of the Frankfurt School). In 1937, Horkheimer defined critical theory, in opposition to traditional theory, as a self-reflexive theory, conscious of the social conditions in which it unfolds, and as aiming at their emancipatory transformation. 3 The name “critical theory” was then used as a way to disguise an unavowable reference to Marxism—although it was a renewed Marxism read in light of Hegel, against a positivist reading that was current in the discourses of political parties at the time. The idea was to develop a theory that would not accept the socioeconomic reality, and that could question the socioeconomic processes by performing an overall judgment on society and the direction it should take. At the beginning of the 1940s, considering that the sciences, even dialectically integrated into a general theory of social development, could not guarantee criticism anymore, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School took the new shape of a radical dialectic of Enlightenment, and later the shape of a “negative dialectic,” as it was developed by Adorno.4 Performing what is commonly referred to as the “linguistic turn,” Habermas argued that the criticism of rationality that had so far been developed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School was too one-sided to provide a basis for a renewed theory of society and developed a theory of communicative rationality.
In parallel, a broader form of critical thinking emerged in Europe and in the United States. Critical theory in this broad sense is not a unified theory either, but rather a collection of different styles of critical thinking. Gender Studies, Subaltern or Postcolonial Studies, Ecological thinking, Feminism, and Neo-Marxism can all be placed within this broad current of thought, with thinkers as different as Althusser, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, Negri, Balibar, Laclau, Mouffe, and Butler as their main representatives. 5 A section of this critical literature should be analyzed in relation to Marxism, and can be conceived at least as a criticism, if not as a sort of continuation of it. Many of these critical thinkers don’t mention the Frankfurt School. Some of these critical thinkers have occasionally defined their position in reference to the Frankfurt theory: we can mention The Postmodern Condition of Lyotard and a few incidental remarks made by Foucault on his affinity with the Frankfurt School as he expressed the regret that he had not read it earlier. 6 Critical theory in this large sense operates by mobilizing concepts and methods that are not necessarily strictly philosophical. But a shared purpose among all these thinkers is to use these concepts and methods in order to call into question the relationship between knowledge or discourse and power. In this sense, criticism has also been understood as a diagnosis of the present and as an engaged practice rather than as a mere theory. Foucault speaks of a “critical ontology of ourselves,” which is not to be considered as “a theory, a doctrine, nor even a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating,” but “an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”7
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