Jürgen Habermas – Modernity—An Incomplete Project (1980)

Trans. Seyla Ben-Habib. ’This essay was originally delivered as as a talk in September 1980 when Habermas was awarded the Theodor W. Adorno prize by the city of Frankfurt. It was subsequently delivered as a James Lecture of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University in March 1981 and published under the title “Modernity Versus Postmodernity” in New German Critique 22 (Winter, 1981)’.

Featuring Hans Robert Jauss, Baudelaire, Bergson, Benjamin, Robespierre, Octavio Paz, Peter Bürger, Daniel Bell, Weber, Peter Steinfels, Adorno, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, Albrecht Wellmer, Peter Weiss, Brecht, Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Aristotle, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, Robert Spaemann, Wittgenstein, Carl Schmitt, Gottfried Benn.

‘The “young conservatives” recapitulate the basic experience of aesthetic modernity. They claim as their own the revelations of a decentered subjectivity, emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness, and with this experience they step outside the modern world. On the basis of modernistic attitudes they justify an irreconcilable antimodernism. They remove into the sphere of the far-away and the archaic the spontaneous powers of imagination, self-experience and emotion. To instrumental reason they juxtapose in Manichean fashion a principle only accessible through evocation, be it the will to power or sovereignty, Being or the Dionysiac force of the poetical. In France this line leads from Georges Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida.’