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Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Thomas McCarthy
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Extract

There is widespread agreement among critical theorists that reason has to be understood as culturally mediated and interwoven with social practice. The embeddedness and variability of basic categories, principles, standards, and procedures mean that the critique of reason has henceforth to be carried out in conjunction with social, cultural, and historical analysis. We can no longer hope to fathom its 'nature, scope, and limits' through an introspective survey of the contents of consciousness, but have to study the acts and products, utterances and texts, practices and institutions in which it is embodied. That is to say, 'self-reflection' has now to proceed through the interpretation and critique of the socio-historical world.

Type
Part Three: Transforming Philosophy
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 19: New Essays on Méta-Philosophie - Reconstructing Philosophy? , 1993 , pp. 247 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1993

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References

1 This paper is a precis of the line of argument set out in my Ideals and Illusions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1991).

2 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979), 390

3 Ibid., 174; 367

4 See Hilary Putnam, ‘Why Reason Can't be Naturalized,’ inK. Baynes,J. Bohman, T. McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1987) 222-44.

5 Richard Rorty, ‘Solidarity or Objectivity,’ in J. Rajchman and C. West, eds., Post-Analytic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press 1985) 3-19, at 13 6 In what follows I am referring to Foucault's work from the 1970s, until now the most influential in the English-speaking world, and not to the earlier or later phases of his thought.

7 Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ in Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon 1980) 109-33, at 131

8 See Nancy Fraser, ‘Foucault on Modem Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,’ in Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989), 17-34.

9 See especially Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in P. Rabinow ,ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon 1984) 32-50, and my analysis in Ideals and Illusions, 60-75.

10 See, for example, the interview with Julia Kristeva in Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1981) 115-36. 11 Positions, 32

12 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1976), 10 13 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man,’ in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982) 109-36, at 135

14 Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,’ in Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1978) 278-93, at 280-1

15 Positions, 19

16 Positions, 33 17 See, for instance, his response to critics in ‘But beyond … ,’ Critical Inquiry 13 (1986) 155-70.

18 ‘Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion,’ an interview with Gerald Graff, in Derrida, Limited, Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1988) 111-60, at 150

19 Ibid., 147

20 Ibid., 136 21 For this analogy see especially his Postmetaphysical Thinking (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1992), 125-7.

22 In what follows I depart somewhat from Habermas’ terminology in order to convey a few of his basic ideas in what are, I hope, more familiar terms.

23 See Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall1967) and Habermas's discussion of different models of social action in his Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I (Boston: Beacon Press 1984﹜, 75-101. 24 See Melvin Pollner, ‘Mundane Reasoning,’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences 4 (1975) 35-54, and Habennas's discussion of this point in Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I, 12-15.

25 Thus not all of my arguments will apply equally to all of the authors mentioned above.

26 Postmetaphysical Thinking, 47

27 Interview with Paul Rabinow, in The Foucault Reader 239-56, at 249

28 ‘What is Enlightenment?’ 45-6

29 This point has been developed by Stephen K. White in Political Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991).

30 See William Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press 1987), and my discussion of it in Ideals and Illusions, 76-82.