The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

Introduction

Twelve lectures, some of them first given in Paris in 1983 and then in the United States, published by Suhrkamp in 1985. Habermas traces how, since Hegel, philosophy has tried to ground modernity in its own principles, and how a line running from Nietzsche to Heidegger, Bataille, Derrida and Foucault turned instead against reason as such. These critiques, he argues, end in a performative contradiction: they must use the reason they deny. As a way out he proposes his own concept of communicative rationality. The book is Habermas’s main contribution to the debate on postmodernism and defends modernity as an “unfinished project”, a phrase from his Adorno Prize speech of 1980.

Connections

Criticizes

• On the Genealogy of Morality1887 · Friedrich Nietzsche
• Dialectic of Enlightenment1944 · Theodor W. Adorno
• Of Grammatology1967 · Jacques Derrida
• Discipline and Punish1975 · Michel Foucault

More works by Jürgen Habermas

• 1962The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
• 1968Knowledge and Human Interests
• 1981The Theory of Communicative Action