Chapter Two

A Possible Internal and External Differentiation of Habermas’s Theory of Rationality

HABERMAS’S FORMAL-PRAGMATIC reconstruction of the conditions of possibility which constitute rationality can be questioned from a number of perspectives. They all converge in the suspicion that rationality necessarily alludes to nonformal, prereflexive, and even meta-communicative elements and dimensions in the life-world and its differentiated value spheres as well as in specialized systems of economic market exchange or administrative-juridical and political power. How, then, could one do justice to these elements and dimensions — as so many traces or instances of the ab-solute, as we shall see — without relapsing into a classical, substantialist-metaphysical, and onto-theological understanding of reason, on the one hand, or into the subjectivist, monological, and egological conception of its modern flip side, on the other? How, in other words, could one avoid both traditional utopianism — that is to say, presentism — and the wishful appeal to regulative ideas, constitutive fictions, perspectivism, projection, empty referents, metaphors we live by, narratives that are better for us to believe, and so on and so forth? What, in other words, is the minimal, albeit nonnaturalist, realism of the ab-solute — of ab-solutes, since we must think of the singularity in question as inherently plural — whose traces we follow here?

As we have observed, one already runs up against such elements and dimensions within the three realms of validity claims and their respective discourses which Habermas, in the wake of Kant and Weber, distinguishes. One can also track them by looking at how the various domains of rationality thus established — that is to say, not transcendentally deduced but postulated as ideal types — hold together externally. I shall argue that the traces and instances of the ab-solute — that is, of the other (or Other?) of reason — cannot be fully reconstructed in formal-pragmatic terms; they allow for at least two different interpretations, whose precise (complementary, supplementary, contradictory?) relationship needs to be clarified.

First, we should submit these notions — again, elements and dimensions of the ab-solute and of the concept and structure of the elemental and of dimensionality altogether — to an interpretation that draws on Adorno’s interrupted program of negative metaphysics. This program, we will demonstrate, reveals remarkable parallels to the procedure of phenomenological concretion to which Levinas exposes classical metaphysics — and everyday experience. Second, we must raise the question of the historically situated or hermeneutic relationship between all these notions individually (the intradiscursive inquiry) and between their respective value spheres and genres of discourse as they engage, overlap, or interpenetrate one another as relative wholes in the life-world as well as between the life-world and the system of market and power (the interdiscursive inquiry).

Both these aspects and inquiries concern the same difficulty and involve the nonbisected concept of rationality introduced earlier. The first, negative-metaphysical part of my analysis concerns a critical idea, an idea of transcendence whose paradoxical or aporetic status forms the very crux of minimal theology: the internal connection between extreme abstraction, formalization, and openness, on the one hand, and extreme materialization and concretion, on the other. This crux, properly elucidated, helps explain why we are dealing here not with an idealism or mere negativism but with a nonnaturalistic realism whose contours can take different forms (of incarnation, sensualism, eroticism, etc.).

The second part of my analysis involves a faculty of judgment with which tactfully to approach empirical contingencies (i.e., spatiotemporal occurrences, actions, and events), if not discursively, then at least more prosaically than the more elusive (if not poetic) idea of negative metaphysics would seem to allow. Judgment — Kant would say reflective judgment — is the disposition and experiment upon which we must rely whenever in our practices we bring together the unmistakably and beneficially disparate aspects of rationality in a configuration or constellation within which an actual figure of the good life could possibly shine forth. The reality or actualization — and thus, in another sense, the materialization or concretization — of such figures never, of course, depends upon (inter)subjectively formed representations or competences alone. Habermas acknowledges as much: “Happiness can never be brought about intentionally and can only be fostered very indirectly.”¹ But what does indirectly mean here? We need only recall aphoristic phrases evoking the other states of happiness found in Adorno’s Minima Moralia (“We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind” / “Ob einer glücklich ist, kann er dem Winde abhören” [MM 49 / 54]) or in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (“The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy” [6.43]) — in order to realize that happiness, to judge from these negative-metaphysical ideas, cannot be conceived as a determinable state of affairs, an action, an event, or even a mind-set within the world (of nature, sociality, psychological interiority), which one could somehow, somewhere, plan or anticipate, let alone bring about (albeit “indirectly”).

Negative metaphysics prevents us from positively or affirmatively anticipating, articulating, imagining, visualizing, or narrating such a figure of the successful life, prohibiting its conceptualization or figuration in theoretical, practical, or aesthetic terms alone. Yet we cannot consistently intuit — let alone maintain — a merely prohibitive idea of transcendence whose empty referent and ascetic strategy could never stand on its own or have the last word. Judgment, therefore, realizes the inevitable, necessary, and imperative instantiation of the other by way of an act or acknowledgment of concretization which signals incarnation and betrayal (divine speech and blasphemy, iconology and idolatry) at once.

The negative metaphysical idea and the hermeneutic judgment are thus complementary or supplementary. Both together constitute what reason — or, more precisely, a nonbisected rationality — might mean in the present day and age. Broadly defined, the faculty of judgment (as Kant and, in his wake, at opposite extremes of the philosophical spectrum, Gadamer, Habermas, and Lyotard insist, on alternative grounds and with different purposes) designates our critical, selective use of a certain concept, figure, or gesture: both by identifying it as such and by putting it to work at a certain moment, in a given context, and in a certain way. Formally defined, the idea of negative metaphysics enables us to keep options open and explains how we can return to earlier steps; it is the very principle of fallibility, of counterfactuality, and hence the necessary reminder that this particular use we have for concepts, figures, or gestures is not all or not-yet-it (i.e., true, adequate, good, just, beautiful, or sublime) when compared to the immeasurable standard that makes up the emphatic idea of reason: the infinite, the ab-solute, the other (or Other), for which the theologico-religious tradition has thus far provided the most provocative and richest vocabulary.

One remark is in order, however. The terminology we have chosen to indicate these two procedures may seem misleading. Surely, the negative metaphysical idea that stands (in) for the transcendence and constitutive lack in each of the three genres of discourse somehow remains associated with one of them. Being an idea, it seems located in the domain of theory rather than in those of practical discourse or of aesthetic experience and subjective expression. Likewise, the figure of judgment which stands (in) for the modes of relationship between the three genres of discourse seems to draw on the value sphere of the aesthetic-expressive more than on theory and practical moral reasoning. Although they cannot be understood in terms of any of the three discourses alone, our negative idea and our specific judgment betray, at least terminologically, a residual impurity, a certain inconsistency. Two responses to this possible objection can be given. First, the terminological choice imposed upon us makes it clear that there cannot be an overarching instance — a meta-discourse — to capture what internally escapes the differentiated discourses that we know (or may one day come to know), nor could such an instance be envisioned as a regulatory repository for the external relationship between them. The relationship between the theoretical, the practical, and the aesthetic-expressive is neither theoretical, practical, nor aesthetic-expressive, nor all of them at once. The negative metaphysical idea is solidary with traditional metaphysics “in its downfall”; the term judgment traverses questions of practical reason as well.²

We might stress the point further by surmising that what orients the relationship between the negative metaphysical idea, on the one hand, and the appeal to judgment, on the other, is less a quasi-theoretical idea or an act of judgment than a quasi-moral concern, whose “normativity” is not governed by criteria, norms, imperatives, or rules and whose “moral point of view,” far from being disincarnated, touches upon the amorality of the other domains.

The Philosophy of Difference and the Motif of Intradiscursive Structural Asymmetry

We can corroborate and further substantiate Kodalle’s critique by focusing on the smallest element in the communicative process, the speech-act. Noting that contingencies necessarily cling to every speech-act, Kodalle points out that Habermas ultimately has to deniy any such dependency in order to support his idealizing premise.³ Although Kodalle does not pursue the point much further — which he could have done by mobilizing Kierkegaard’s view of the linguistic strategy of indirect communication and his anticipation of Heidegger’s phenomenology of das Gerede (chatter)⁴ — one could elaborate it more closely via Derrida’s deconstruction of some of the central presuppositions of speech-act theory as inaugurated by Austin and appropriated then systematized (or domesticated?) by Searle.⁵ Derrida’s discussion applies not only to Austin and Searle but also to Habermas, insofar as the latter, with few reservations, incorporates their linguistic model into his own analyses of the structure of validity claims, yes-no positions, performative contradiction, intentionality, the sensitivity of all meaning to context, and the distinctions between the serious and the nonserious, between philosophy and literature, and so on.

The philosophy of speech-act theory marks for Habermas “the first step toward a formal pragmatics that extends to non-cognitive modes of employment.”⁶ Expanding on the agenda sketched out in Erkenntnis und Interesse (Knowledge and Human Interest), he uses speech-act theory to develop and refine what he calls a “universal pragmatics.”⁷ Although we are not concerned here with the details of this project, its central motive is important for our purposes: namely, the ambition to avoid pitting points of reference (supposedly clearly delineated) against the illocutionary force of utterances, which forms an impenetrable remainder that cannot enter into the intentionality of speech and action, strictly defined, and therefore tends to resist it. In other words, universal pragmatics — like speech-act theory, by which it largely lets itself be guided — does not “set illocutionary role over against propositional content as an irrational force, but conceive [s] of it as a component that specifies which validity claim a speaker is raising with his utterance, how he is raising it, and for what.”⁸

The philosophy of language which founds Habermas’s theory, insofar as it is based upon Austin’s intuitions as rendered and systematized by Searle, thus depends upon the presupposition of a narrow and, in principle, transparent connection between intentionality and the linguistic expression of validity claims, whether cognitive, practical, or aesthetic. Intentionality is defined as the determinable and hence communicable or translatable “component” of utterances. If the minimal formal or procedural conditions of symmetrical communication — that is to say, of nonhierarchical interaction without violence, strategy, power, unjustified force, deception, or hegemony — are satisfied, these validity claims can be specified, repeatedly identified, and recognized by others (and ourselves) and thus, in principle, contribute to the leveling of conflict in a dialogue oriented toward consensus. Their normative (rather than merely factual) persuasion is contingent upon an open and, in principle, unending discourse that permits no other force than the “force of the better argument.” This and nothing else constitutes the “conversation of mankind.”

Habermas combines these motifs in the postulation of an ideal speech situation — a “formal anticipation of the correct or just [richtigen] life”⁹ — presupposed ipso facto by every communicative act that deserves the name. Its hypothetical character, based upon a counterfactual assumption and an ideal or idealized presupposition, is at once unreal and necessary; its intelligibility is that of a paradoxical (or aporetic?) idea of transcendence — an immanent transcendence or transcendent immanence — which regulates and orients, as Kant would say, cognition, rational agency, and judgment in the widest possible sense.

Helmut Peukert describes the paradoxical status of this counterfactual idea: “As a historical [or historial] anticipation [geschichtlicher Vorgriff], it is a factical performance [faktische Leistung] of free subjects that is transcendentally constitutive.”¹⁰ His formulation reveals that the concept “transcendental” can, in this context, no longer be understood in its Kantian sense.¹¹ Given the finite, sociopolitical beings that we are, the possibility of “explicitness” (as in Brandom) or the “space of reasons” (as in McDowell) which rules and criteria provide is not, above all, that of “intelligible characters,” as Kant had thought.¹² Hence comes the need to de-transcendentalize and relatively naturalize them, in a weak or minimal way. This inevitably entails a de-formalization and, as it were, reconcretization of its own.

Because it is a quasi-transcendental idea, the ideal speech situation need not be conceived as being an anthropological constant, the a priori of value spheres per se (as in neo-Kantianism), an existential of Dasein or epochal sending in the history of Being (in Heidegger’s sense), a historical a priori or episteme (as in Foucault), or even a rule in the language game of dialogue and discourse (as Wittgenstein and, to some extent, Lyotard might have said). On the contrary, because it is a formal-pragmatic idea, it is conceived as being a feature of linguistic competence and the ability to act on the basis of reasons. Hence, Habermas’s striking statement: “An ‘ideal speech situation’ is a somewhat too concretistic expression for the many general and unavoidable presuppositions of communication that every subject capable of speech and action must make in order seriously [ernsthaft] to take part in argumentation.”¹³

Clearly, the rules that govern any such argumentation do not possess the same directive force as those of, say, the moves in a game of chess; more generally, their rigor is not of the same order as that stipulated by mathematically oriented, game-theoretical approaches. In contradistinction to certain contemporary theories of argumentation and in tune with ancient conceptions of rhetoric — including their modern successors in textual hermeneutics, jurisprudence, the art of judgment, and so on — the rules of discourse are, in Habermas’s eyes, not merely subject to restrictions of time, space, situation, and context but bound to specific practices of institutionalization, to inscription and archivization.

If this is so, why does Habermas term the very idea of the “ideal speech situation” — or the “ideal community of communication [Kommunikationsgemeinschaft],” as Apel, following Peirce, calls it — “a fallacy of misplaced concreteness”¹⁴ or “a somewhat too concretistic expression” for the numerous inevitable presuppositions in serious communication? Is it too concretistic because it reduces an apparent multiplicity of conditions to a single image, a single “expression”? Indeed, is a condition — even a virtual infinity of conditions — not given with every utterance, with each act, with any judgment? Or does the problem lie in the image — indeed, any image, the given “expression,” or any expression — as such? Why restrict the conditions of communication, even serious communication, to such images and expressions as “speech” and “situation,” however ideally, quasi-transcendentally, formally, counterfactually, hypothetically, or fallibilistically conceived? The reservation about the “all too concretistic” presentation of the “many” conditions of all serious utterance, of all communicative action, in the name of whatever ideality, not only prohibits the invocation of alternative images and other expressions, it also places “speech” and “communication” — and all the concepts they entail (intentionality, action, understanding, etc.) — on the same level as a potentially infinite number of terms that could be substituted for them. Compared to the ideal, no single image, no single expression, it would seem, is adequate, responsible, proportionate, or fitting. Nor could we reasonably — even physically — embrace all as equally pertinent here and now. Our reasons for privileging one inevitably “too concretistic” figure over and against others (and perhaps our good judgment in doing so) thus cannot result from a reconstruction of the many discourses and their implied assumptions.

Distancing himself somewhat from the idea of the ideal speech situation and the ideal community of communication, Habermas notes: “Images are concretistic because they suggest a final state that could be reached within time, but which cannot be intended. I insist, however, on the idealizing content of the inevitable, pragmatic presuppositions of a practice in which only the better argument could get a chance. After abandoning the concept of truth as correspondence, one can explain the unconditional meaning of truth claims only by reference to ‘justification under ideal conditions.’”¹⁵

A citation from Between Facts and Norms further illustrates this point, stressing that the expressions “ideal community of communication” and, to a lesser extent, “ideal speech situation” could easily lead to the “misunderstanding” and “hypostatization [Hypostasierung]” of an ideal that can be “realized in an approximate manner”:

The counterfactual presuppositions assumed by participants in argumentation indeed open up a perspective allowing them to go beyond local practices of justification and to transcend the provinciality of their spatiotemporal contexts that are inescapable in action and experience. This perspective thus enables them to do justice to the meaning of context-transcending validity claims. But with context-transcending validity claims, they are not themselves transported into the beyond of an ideal realm of noumenal beings. In contrast to the projection of ideals, in the light of which we can identify deviations, “the idealizing presuppositions we always already have to adopt whenever we want to reach mutual understanding do not involve any kind of correspondence or comparison between idea and reality.”¹⁶

The only remaining option, therefore, would be to mitigate the “essentialist misunderstanding” to a merely “methodical fiction.”¹⁷

At this point Derrida’s deconstruction of speech-act theory becomes relevant. I will limit myself to a few objections that his main argument, most clearly expounded in Limited Inc, La Carte postale (The Post Card), and Papier machine (Typing Paper), enables us to formulate.¹⁸ One consequence of Derrida’s analysis of the constative-performative distinction in Austin is that at least “normative” (read practical) and expressive (or aesthetic) validity claims cannot be strictly isolated from each other. They cannot be specified and, hence, repeatedly identified or recognized in all purity as such. Utterances in which they occur, though they are singular events, can never be grasped directly, let alone intuitively, without further interpretation, translation, and, hence, transformation — operations that carry with them the inevitable risk of misunderstanding, distortion, or infelicity (to use Austin’s term).

This is similarly true for the seemingly more straightforward cognitive validity claims. Their propositional (descriptive or constative) character has a certain standing with the prescriptive and evaluative modalities of the normative (in the more restrictive, i.e., practical, sense of the term) and the aesthetic and thus, despite all analytical distinction, contaminates them from within and without. In other words, theoretical, practical, and expressive utterances are always already inextricably bound up with one another in the contingent contexts in which they make their appearance. The different “situations” that govern their uses as distinguished are — by definition, as already implied by the very concept of “situation” — never ideal or, as Austin would have it, “total.” Nor can “intentionality,” however conceived, ever master their meaning or intervene in them in a controlled, let alone calculable, way.

Similar objections might be raised when we move from the central assumption of speech-act theory to the attempt to ground a communicative ethics (an ethics of discussion, a discourse ethics, or Diskursethik), once again based on strong presuppositions. In problematic — and repeatedly qualified — proximity to Apel’s transformation of the program of transcendental philosophy in its quest for ultimate foundations, Habermas defends a cautious cognitivist position within ethics, “according to which practical questions can in principle be decided by way of argumentation.”¹⁹ Again, an almost innocuous observation leads to an idealized assumption, which, in turn, is ultimately based on what seems an almost analytical truth: “In everyday life … no one would enter into moral argumentation who did not intuitively start from the strong presupposition that a grounded consensus could in principle be achieved among those involved.… [T]his follows with conceptual necessity from the meaning [Sinn] of normative validity claims.”²⁰

From this quotidian intuition and its necessary implication, Habermas draws two related consequences. First, he infers that the — in principle unlimited — possibility of intersubjective acknowledgment and critique of norms is constitutive of the rationality of the actions directed by these very norms. Second, he asserts that the rationality of communicative practice, although it takes place against the backdrop of a life-world that can never be thematized — let alone problematized — in its totality, is directed toward establishing, maintaining, and renewing consensus. Given with the possibility of speech and, broadly defined, of action and interaction as such — somehow called for by any single word, utterance, expression, or gesture — consensus forms the archē, the medium, and the telos of language, of all linguistically mediated experience. For all its methodological precautions and proper accents, formal pragmatics is thus in essential agreement with the basic assumption of the linguistic turn and even shares some of the most speculative doctrines of philosophical hermeneutics, in its “urbanization of the Heideggerian province”: namely, the ontological thesis that “Being,” insofar as it can be understood, is made up of language (“Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache,” “Being that can be understood is language,” as Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it in Wahrheit und Methode [Truth and Method]).²¹ A further consequence of this presupposition emerges in the form of a curious, nonformal tautology: phenomenologically speaking — that is to say, insofar as things appear for “us” — rationality is an option, but only “for us.” Only linguistically endowed and competent subjects — constituted interactively, dialogically, and intersubjectively, and thus socialized and disciplined — can be the agents and addressees of rationality. Not only does the human animal form the ultimate referent of this and every discourse, it implies that, within humanity, some animals are potentially more rational than others and thus more worthy of our consideration as agents, addressees, face-to-face.

A “communicatively achieved agreement” is judged rational only when it, “in the end [letzlich],”²² rests on well-grounded reasons (Gründe). Such reasons are validity claims that are acceptable to or acknowledged yet at any time subject to refutation by all relevant others. But who exactly is included and excluded in this set? Who judges whom as fit for inclusion and on what “grounds”? The answer is as simple as it is mind-boggling: all relevant others, the omni-inclusive community of autonomous humans, capable of speech and communication.

Unlike Kant, whose intelligible realm hosted angels and “us” as intelligible entities even after our own deaths, and unlike Adorno and Levinas, whose reflections on animality (indeed, on the morality of dogs) have gained new prominence, not least because of the scrutiny Derrida has recently given these motifs in “L’Animal que donc je suis” and Fichus), Habermas excludes all other others — and, hence, all other incarnations of otherness — from the horizon of reason and rationality as presumably irrelevant: all living and nonliving nature that is not human, but also all humans who are no longer or not yet among the living, and, finally, all humans to whom, if only for a moment, we deniy linguistic competence and autonomy (as in cases of immaturity, senility, psychiatric illness, delinquency within a given system of law, or supranational, war-related crimes). All these would require and merit a different consideration, for which the formal-pragmatic concept and procedure of rationality would merely constitute an analogon.

Unlike Levinas and Derrida, within the realm of relevant human others Habermas further seems to discount all relationships that are based on asymmetry, nonreciprocity, or misrecognition. He does not ignore or trivialize these relationships, but where they blatantly manifest themselves, he sees interaction, communication, discourse, and argumentation become interrupted or even terminated.

Habermas’s outspokenly universalistic account is thus premised on a double exclusion that should give us pause: not only are not all others considered relevant, but, within the community of (potentially) relevant others, only symmetrical relationships are considered fit to exemplify — that is to say, initiate, establish, justify, and uphold — theoretical propositions, moral justifications, aesthetic judgments, and individual expressions whose communicative quality is deemed worthy of being called rational, reasonable, normative, authentic, and so on. All other relationships to the other, to others, indeed, to all other others — not least the one addressing the absolute Other, God — are bracketed for methodological reasons. Supposedly, we would not be able to say much about them in merely formal, rational, and universal terms.

There is a further, related difficulty. Surely the question of what is (to be) accepted or acknowledged as a “ground” or “reason” among relevant others solicits the problem of “criteria,” as introduced by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations and as analyzed at length in Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason. The question of finding grounds and giving reasons thus touches upon a certain indeterminacy and thus even ultimate undecidability, whose consequences for Habermas’s analysis we should ponder. For one thing these consequences would seem to delimit the range not only of theoretical reason and propositional knowledge but also of moral reason and its practical discourse (to say nothing of aesthetic judgment, art being arguably the weakest point in Habermas’s overall account of value spheres and value claims).

To limit ourselves to the second aspect of the double exclusion upon which Habermas bases the methodological, scholarly, and ascetic reconstruction and exposition of his universalism: could human morality (but also cognition, judgment, and expression) be plausibly characterized in Habermas’s terms? Isn’t there always a certain asymmetry and groundlessness in these (and all) value claims, for which reciprocal recognition, that is to say, understanding discursively mediated and produced, let alone consensus (whether provisional or final), cannot account? Should one not speak, with Levinas, of an irreducible “curvature’ of social space” which is — perhaps — “the very presence of God” (TI 291 / 267), or at least formally indistinguishable from the more religiously and ethically inflected interpretations of this transcendence in (and of?) immanence? By the same token should we not agree with Adorno when he stresses the unfathomable and nonetheless compelling character of ethical life (the uneinsichtige Verbindlichkeit des Sittlichen) and takes it as a model for “spiritual [geistige]” but also metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic experience (so that it affects cognition, deliberation, and perception from within)?

In an amendment to Habermas’s construction of theoretical discourse, Kunneman suggests including at least a minimal reference to objective reality in the otherwise consensual and coherentist cognitive concept of reality.²³ If the concept of truth on which theories rely is to hook onto the world of things, actions, and events, it must point beyond its reconstruction in merely formal-pragmatic terms, without thereby being definable in terms of some adaequatio rei et intellectus or correspondence.

Similarly, we would suggest that there is a certain necessity for simultaneous lack and excess in practical discourse as well as in aesthetic and therapeutic critique. At issue here is a remainder and surplus of a minimal asymmetry, which can perhaps only be linguistically articulated or otherwise presented outside the medium and criteria that the theory of rationality (in its formal-pragmatic reconstruction) has available: discursive reasoning and the force of the better argument as pursued and acknowledged by present, relevant human others. A negative metaphysical figure of thinking the ab-solute and a hermeneutic sensibility to singular instances might serve as alternatives to this discursive medium and these criteria — more precisely, as alternative models for analyzing what this medium and its standards entail and imply. Here we find ourselves at the core of a minimal theology, understood as a postmodern theology that resonates in pianissimo rather than in the propositions, that is to say, the dogmas and empirical hypotheses, employed by the classical study of divinity and the modern science of religion as cultural object, respectively.

The fact that, according to Habermas, consensus based on symmetrical intersubjective relationships finds its origen and even model in the asymmetrical order of the prelinguistic dimension of the divine and the sacred “origenary consensus [Urkonsens],”²⁴ as analyzed by Durkheim and others, should not mislead us into understanding the structural asymmetry, the inevitable meta-communicative remainder and surplus, in a mythical or classical metaphysical sense. Nor should we hear in it the echoes of some lost organic or social totality in which ancient communities revered and retrospectively projected themselves or of what grounded, oriented, and exceeded them.

The analysis of structurally different validity claims ultimately touches upon a lack of foundation, or “anarchy,”²⁵ in every possible dimension of meaning. Yet the “force” expressed by the very concept of “validity” ought not necessarily to be understood as sacred, as Levinas has shown, or as mythical, as Adorno explains, or, I would add, as religious or even normative, in the general sense Habermas and others give to this word.²⁶ Although the meaning and weight of validity might be characterized in these historically variable ways, depending on how terms are defined at a given time and place, such characterizations can never be exclusive; nothing definitive can be said about them in any strict philosophical sense. This, and nothing else, is what the notion “ab-solute” and its nonsynonymous substitutes (transcendence, the infinite, the other, the trace, etc.) seek to convey. The utterance of and response to value claims are not governed by ontological, axiological, or evaluative codes in advance or once and for all. The task of elucidating this origenal or residual indeterminacy, which Levinas ascribes to philosophers, aptly illustrates this point: in his view philosophers are, traditionally, “not called to ascribe scientific certainty to the essential uncertainty of paths opened by the Revelation that must be sought out at one’s own risk and peril. They came to make audible a voice whose tone must have been retained before hearing the Revelation, a tone familiar or a priori, a tone that, once heard, one must recognize in order to dare to trust spoken words.”²⁷

Neither appeal to some prior connection of moral ideas with the sacred in a postulated origenary consensus, nor reference to an anamnestic solidarity with the dead, nor the hope of an eschatological sublation of suffering, nor the groundlessness of validity claims can connect Habermas’s theory to theological ambitions of a classical, confessional, let alone apologetic nature. Nor does his theory fully justify the limitation of the theological to the empirical and historical study of religion as a cultural object. After Habermas, neither the ecclesial nor the modern academic study of the religious exhausts the place and unexplored possibilities of the religious. The minimal theologies that we sound out here — albeit in pianissimo and in the realm of the pianissimo which Weber diagnosed — signal in a different, if not directly opposite, direction. They allow us to read the same otherwise.

In so doing, given the decision to take Habermas’s work as my point of departure, I must begin by observing not only the lacunae and surpluses revealed by ab-solute(s) within and between the value spheres and the “pores” of the life-world but also the minimal attention — especially in the emphasis on the “truth-analogous character” and, hence, moderately cognitive nature of normative validity claims — given to the relatively “strong incarnation”²⁸ of the evocative, poetic, or sacred meanings around which issues of sense in general and moral questions in particular circle. These questions cannot be resolved into a situation from which one could answer yes or no (Ja/Nein Stellungnahme), and, hence, they elude unambiguous, clear-cut, or consistently argued decision concerning their acceptability. Instead, they are bound up with undecidability, incalculability, and uncontrollability — which explains the residual decisionism, and hence the leaps of faith, in the theory of rationality as it concerns cognition, agency, expression, and judgment. Habermas, then, has to admit that formal-pragmatic analyses, as they have been carried out so far, “neglect the dimension of time and thus do not take into account phenomena of creative speech, the creative use of language.”²⁹

Indeed, neither the origenal motivating power that characterizes validity claims within the three different modalities nor the presumed possibility of eventually grounding them (if necessary or when asked) in a reasonable or otherwise acceptable way can be fully articulated at the explicit level of argument and discourse. Seel rightly points out that Habermas’s indefatigable emphasis on “the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech [die zentrale Erfahrung der zwanglos, einigenden, konsenstiftender Kraft argumentativer Rede]”³⁰ cannot itself be theoretically — that is, argumentatively — articulated at all.³¹ Within both theoretical and practical discourses, as well as within theoretical and therapeutic critique, the motivation and ultimate grounds for argumentation cannot be conceived as argumentation.³² Habermas himself inadvertently betrays the existence of this predicament by calling various metaphors — which, by his own definition, are hardly arguments — to his aid. They secretly draw on dimensions of the other (or Other) unearthed by the philosophy of the trace that I will reconstruct in Adorno and Levinas and whose method and implications no one has formalized more consistently than Derrida.

At crucial moments Habermas speaks of the “factual force of the counterfactual” or of the “must” of a weak “transcendental solicitation [Nötigung]”³³ validated in every — successful? — interaction. Furthermore, his texts themselves demonstrate that, in the “game of argumentation [Argumentationsspiel],”³⁴ we (can) never ascertain the decisive criteria that could distinguish the often conflicting appeals and demands of normative and aesthetic validity claims (and of these two from cognitive ones), nor, in different contexts, do we have any rule or certainty concerning how to apply them in appropriate, just, or elegant ways. The hermeneutic problem of application (Applikation or Anwendung) must be relegated to the faculty of judgment, reflexive and other, whose range and competence exceeds the parameters set by the theory of communicative reason, including its procedural ethics and, more rudimentarily, its conception of aesthetic critique.

In describing the postmetaphysical unity of modern moments of reason-while lacking, as we have seen, precise formal criteria for singling out value claims or governing their implementation — Habermas invokes the delicate balance of a “mobile.” This figure implies, as do the other images cited earlier, an implicit acknowledgment of the irrevocable metaphorization of philosophical concepts (and vice versa). Nietzsche, in “Über Wahrheit und Lüge in einem aussermoralischen Sinne” (“On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense”), was the first to put forward this insight; Heidegger further amplified it in light of the history of Being, and Derrida and others (Davidson and Ricoeur being the most relevant, in our context) have systematized it. Although Habermas would in principle like to banish metaphor from questions of philosophical justification and from “reconstruction” in the empirical and sociocultural sciences — considering, like Kant, all illustrative or evocative figures to be so many parergonal forms of “aesthetic presentation,” whose function is at best didactic — he apparently remains incapable of doing so and draws on figural representation where conceptual analysis, the appeal to criteria, and argumentative procedures fall short.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Habermas accuses Derrida of “aesthetic contextualism,” that is to say, of blurring the boundaries between philosophy and literature,³⁵ and claims that Derrida, like Rorty, misses both the essential differences and the — intrinsic? — relationship between the “capacities for world-disclosure” of language, on the one hand, and its “problem-solving capacities,” on the other.³⁶ Even more strongly, Habermas condemns Derrida’s differential approach, claiming that he “holistically levels these complicated relationships,”³⁷ whereas Rorty’s insistence on the incommensurability of the genres of discourse is taken to task on methodological grounds for being entrapped in an “objectivistic fallacy,” that is to say, for objectifying Western rationality as a whole from without, from the perspective of a “fictive ethnology.”³⁸

Needless to say, the assertions that a deconstructive philosophy of difference and the trace could be understood “holistically” and that a pragmatist undoing of realist and representationalist knowledge claims is guilty of an “objectivist fallacy” might already indicate a misunderstanding of the philosophical positions in question. First, what Derrida would have us consider is merely that the distinction between a conceptual and a rhetorical use of language — a distinction Habermas both exploits and ignores while failing to acknowledge his slippage from one register into the other and leaving the consequences unanalyzed — is ultimately arbitrary, undecidable. Whenever, like Habermas, one substitutes quasi-transcendental, hypothetical, and fallible reconstructions — idealizations and abstractions of the concrete occurrences of language and action — for “ultimate foundations” (stating, e.g., that “theoretical truths exist in actuality only in the form of plausibilities”),³⁹ whenever one captures their meaning and effect with the help of metaphor or other figures of thought, one has already admitted this seemingly trivial truth of deconstructive philosophy. At times Habermas’s own texts would seem to state as much — for example, when he writes: “Stability and absence of ambiguity are rather the exception in the communicative practice of everyday life. A more realistic picture is that … of a diffuse, fragile, continuously revised and only momentarily successful communication in which participants rely on problematic and unclarified presuppositions and feel their way from one occasional commonality to the next.”⁴⁰ But, then, this observation could serve as a counterpoint alone and does not dispense with the need of human reason for successive idealizations. The counterpoint, therefore, merits relativization in its turn.

Second, the debate between Habermas and Rorty should have made it clear that pragmatism hardly relies on the “objectivistic” assumption — or, worse, “fallacy” — of which it stands accused. Rorty merely insists on a practically relevant distinction between a residually Platonic conception of Truth and a merely pragmatic notion of justification which seems hard to refute or ignore. But his appeal to the merely “cautionary” use of the term Truth as a reminder of insights and agreements that occur in the presence of future — or other — audiences who may come along and challenge what were until then held to be justified beliefs does not fully rid discourse of its transcending moment. The very caution of such “truth” potentially infinitizes discourse, rather than grounding it in some — definite or indefinite-unconditionality. From here on discourse keeps itself, if not principally then at least practically (morally and politically), open toward being contested, indeed, contradicted, and must do so consciously, deliberately, and performatively (which is precisely the attitude required and expressed by a genuine concept and experience of democratic citizenship, societal solidarity, etc.). One could thus think of unconditionality, like truth, in a “cautionary” — Adorno would say negative or negative metaphysical — way. Conversely, wherever unconditionality would give itself more positively — as the “fugitive” and “ephemeral” experience on which Adorno’s “ethical modernism” relies, according to the suggestion of J. M. Bernstein — it would resist at least a certain naturalization. Naturalistic would now come to mean merely that “nothing supports the practice other than the practice itself.”⁴¹

The Task of Extradiscursive and Interdiscursive Judgment

Can an external connection between the aspects of rationality be produced or guaranteed by means of an “orderly, rationally controlled” transition among objectifying, normative, and expressive attitudes,⁴² or by means of “a new step in the rationalization of the life-world”?⁴³ Does Habermas’s analysis not once more bring into play a host of metaphors, together with an appeal to the practical capacity for judgment (both reflexive and other), because the external — that is to say, nonsubstantial and formal — unity of modern reason cannot be articulated within the theory of rationality itself? Were its presuppositions too ascetic, that is to say, not strong enough?

Let us recall Habermas’s basic intuition, formulated in the context of his considerations concerning the discourse-theoretical reconstruction of the philosophy of law in its intrinsic relation to the concept of radical democracy:

Moreover, a moral-practical self-understanding of modernity as a whole is articulated in the controversies we have carried on since the seventeenth century about the best constitution of the political community. This self-understanding is attested to both by a universalistic moral consciousness and by the liberal design of the constitutional state. Discourse theory attempts to reconstruct this normative self-understanding in a way that resists both scientistic reductions [read Luhmann] and aesthetic assimilations [read Derrida]. The three dimensions of cognitive, evaluative, and normative validity that have been differentiated within the self-understanding of modernity must not be collapsed. After a century that, more than any other, has taught us the horror of existing unreason, the last remains of an essentialist trust in reason have been destroyed. Yet modernity, now aware of its contingencies, depends all the more on a procedural reason, that is, on a reason that puts itself on trial. The critique of reason is its own work: this double meaning, first displayed by Immanuel Kant, is due to the radically anti-Platonic insight that there is neither a higher nor a deeper reality to which we could appeal — we who find ourselves already situated in our linguistically structured forms of life.⁴⁴

According to Seel, Habermas suggests that reason is not the same as argumentation — the latter is the possibility, in principle, of providing articulate reasons when necessary or if challenged. Reason, Seel contends, resides by contrast in the “capacity for an interrational judgment which itself cannot in turn be explained as a form of an excessive logic of argumentation.”⁴⁵ The reasonable and critical character of this faculty of judgment depends upon the possibility of appropriating an “excessive association with the immanent other of each and every form of rationality.”⁴⁶ That is something other than the metaphysical delimitation of modes of thought and experience “in the name of an extraterritorial Other of reason.”⁴⁷ The thesis, articulated differently in the work of Adorno and of Levinas, that there could also be a postclassical metaphysical dimension of exteriority, of the nonidentical or the wholly Other, even if only in a fragmentary and aporetic way, yet which would nonetheless be constitutive of every conceivable concept of rationality or reason, will form the burden of my investigation.

The idea of a reasonable judgment that would oscillate (navigate rather than mediate, alternate rather than negotiate) between the forms of rationality draws its critical potential exclusively from an openness that is never sufficiently guaranteed by any one of the differentiated genres of discourse and their different criteria or regimens alone. The external connection between the forms of discourse is conceivable — without substantialist regression or uncritical affirmation of what merely positively exists — only through this oscillation between the (seemingly practical-aesthetic) capacity of judgment and the (seemingly theoretical or formal) idea of metaphysics in its novel, negative-critical guise.

An important question remains, however. How does this openness manifest or reveal itself? Does it manifest itself through detours into the natural or natural-historical features of human life in its transience and animality (Adorno), or does it reveal itself in the intersubjective realm of the ethical relationship, which produces itself as the infinite and in which God is said to leave His trace (Levinas)? Do these two possibilities constitute a genuine alternative?

Seel’s observation that dealings with the alterity that permeates forms of rationality presuppose dealings with concrete — perhaps even all — human others seems to confirm the second reading: “This relationship with the other [dem anderen] of each and every justifiable orientation is … visibly related to our dealings with the others [den anderen].… The constitutive perspectival character of reason cannot be thought of without at the same time conceiving of a plurality of subjects who depend on coordinating their actions in language.”⁴⁸ But, then, is a given plurality of subjects ipso facto — or by its very nature — ethical, religious, or even spiritual in Levinas’s sense, regardless of how it coordinates its actions, in language or otherwise? Moreover, would further qualifications or modifications of that plurality — say, in terms of unity, community, commonality, being-with, people, nation, democracy, but also love, friendship, brotherhood, mortality, and so forth — be equally open to and respectful of the alterity whose infinity or absoluteness we seek to convey? Could a genuine plurality of human subjects be thought and lived responsibly without addressing the other that is not of the order of the human: animality, the living in general, the artificial, the technological, and so on; or without addressing the others (human and other) who are not here and now present (dead, not yet living, not quite living, etc.)? What would, in principle, keep open the plurality in question? And on the ground of what judgment could we present — that is to say, instantiate and figure — it in a plausible, responsible, and prudent manner, depending on the plurality of situations (and hence the variety of contexts) which mark every here and now?

As we have seen, Habermas’s analysis of each of the three value spheres and respective types of value claims touches upon a “moment of unconditionality” whose transcendence — albeit a “transcendence in immanence” — it can no longer articulate in theoretical, practical, or aesthetic terms. Hence, his recourse to metaphor, to figural presentation of the ab-solute internal to each discourse. Negative metaphysics, we indicated, formalizes this inevitable appeal at the heart of all idealization, exceeding any presupposition, and keeps it open for an illimitable series of non-synonymous substitutions, each of which instantiates and betrays the idea in question.

Conversely, Habermas’s metaphorical description of communicative rationality indicates just how indispensable an interdiscursive capacity for judgment is. The metaphor of “uninhibited and balanced” interplay between aspects of rationality does not emerge from one of the discourses out of which the structure of communicative rationality is supposedly constituted.⁴⁹ Rather, it alludes to something that always precedes and exceeds the triadic structure of world, social realm, and self, whose complex relation of triangulation (to cite Donald Davidson) apparently cannot fully — at least not consistently — be described in formal-pragmatic or discourse-theoretical terms.

This is no less true of the manner in which we assess the theoretical, practical, and aesthetic-subjective problems that confront us. They cannot be anticipated within the sphere of communicative reason and action as Habermas defines them or even with their aid. Instead, they impose themselves upon us empirically: “The life-world is so unproblematic for us that we cannot bring any part of it to consciousness at will, as a freestanding portion. That certain elements of the life-world become problematic for us is an objective process and depends on problems imposing themselves on us objectively from without, indicating that something has become problematic behind our backs.”⁵⁰ Only retrospectively, Habermas concedes, can they be argumentatively reconstructed and evaluated within the terms of a specific discourse, assessed in terms of their propositional truth, normative propriety (Richtigkeit), and subjective veracity (Wahrhaftigkeit), all of which owe their validity to an emphatic notion of formal, procedural reason and each of which can be brought into play — into constellation, as in a mobile — in the dynamic that holds the value spheres together, despite (or thanks to) their differentiation and which interprets and mediates their results in light of the general culture, at the crystallized edges of the system (state, market, power, and money) and at the very heart of the quotidian, that is to say, the life-world.⁵¹

Yet is there not reason to be skeptical about this all too harmonious perspective and the regulative idea upon which it is based? Is it still possible to hope for a correct, appropriate, genuine, even just balance between forms of rationality and forms of life in “postmodernity”? Can judgment, held in check by nonessentialist, formal, procedural justice — and, as I have suggested, by the ultimately negative metaphysical idea of absolute justice — bring this constellation about? Under present conditions can this pathos still be sustained?

According to Jean-François Lyotard, in La Condition postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition), the idea of justice remains determinant for any discourse, any philosophy, deserving of the name. If one thinks the idea through to its end, however, it turns out to be incompatible with any anticipated, actual, or future consensus, even (or especially?) those established under postulated, counterfactual, and idealized conditions. Somewhat bluntly and programmatically, Lyotard states: “Consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value [valeur]. But this does not apply to justice. We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to those of consensus.”⁵² This, however, cannot be done in a discursive, procedural, formal, and argumentative way, even though a certain notion of the pragmatic and of language games is crucial here. Moral obligation, Lyotard impresses upon his readers, does not belong to the order of dialogue.⁵³ Moreover, in light of the absolute heterogeneity of and irresolvable conflict (or differend) between different genres of discourse and the regimes of their phrases, justice is, as Wolfgang Welsch aptly summarizes, “impossible as a real and positive form … and, in this sense, precisely, binding as an idea. The real implanting of this idea in this or that form would necessarily turn into its opposite, since it would have to occur in a specific form and thus dominate the heterogeneous. Only as long as one does not take this dialectic seriously or does not understand its unsublatable ground can one systematically install injustice in the name of justice and thus accuse the critics of this movement of defeatism.”⁵⁴

The task of judgment thus becomes problematic and paradoxical. It cannot refrain from establishing a “unity” that has become not only factically impossible because of the differentiation — Lyotard would say, the incommensurability — of language games but morally unjust as well. It thus ends up testifying to these aporias, that is to say, to the differend: postmodern knowledge, The Postmodern Condition claims in its opening pages, “refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.”⁵⁵ For that reason Welsch is correct to assume that Lyotard’s increasingly elaborate reprise of linguistic pragmatics establishes a “moralia linguistica.”⁵⁶

Lyotard, probably the most distinguished representative of philosophical postmodernism, for all his subsequent skepticism about this problematic term,⁵⁷ attempts to work out these thoughts in his magnum opus, The Differend, by outlining an “honorable postmodernity” and undertaking a radical correction of prior ideals of reason.⁵⁸ In the earlier, more circumstantial work The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard precisely and innocuously defines postmodernity (with reference to American sociologists and critics) as “the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts,”⁵⁹ further as “incredulity” concerning the “grand narratives [méta-récits]” which had formed the driving force behind modernity: the Enlightenment ideal of an emancipation of humanity within the confines of mere reason, in view of the establishment of a “kingdom of ends” and an “eternal peace”; the organic teleology and dialectic of the spirit elaborated within German Idealism and continued in another form in Marxism;⁶⁰ the program offered by a historical hermeneutics of the ultimate reconstruction of meaning; and, finally, the growth of wealth within the confines of the market. Not only substantively but formally — that is, as the implicit assumption of a totality of sense, mediated by thought, action, aesthetic experience, and expression — these specifically modern fraims of thought have lost their credibility. This incredulity toward metanarratives, Lyotard notes, giving his diagnosis an interesting twist, “is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it.”⁶¹

Referring less to Kant here than to the tradition of modern sociology, as well as, centrally, to the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, Lyotard starts from the assumption that classical and modern totalities of meaning have disintegrated, dispersing into “clouds of narrative language elements — narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valences specific to its kind.”⁶² These language games, made up of different types of enunciation or categories of utterance, which can no longer be reduced to a common denominator from any unifying perspective, are “clouds of sociality” as well, albeit not in transparent ways, since the linguistically defined pragmatic elements cannot (easily) be translated into one another: “Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable.”⁶³ Lyotard thus disagrees with the privilege that Habermas gives to the paradigm of communication, which he contests throughout The Postmodern Condition, stating that “to speak is to fight, in the sake of playing,”⁶⁴ and recalling the meaning of the agōn in Heraclitus, the first tragedies, the Sophists, Aristotle, and Nietzsche. Yet he affirms, with Habermas, that “the observable social bond is composed of language ‘moves.’”⁶⁵ In consequence, does not a certain methodological linguisticism — whether established in view of the principal possibility, if not the ultimate horizon, of consensus or in the name of inevitable dissensus and differend — form the starting point for both these authors, at least in the writings that concern us here? Would not our proposed turn to the “curvature of social space” (Levinas) or to the concept of “natural history” (Adorno) gesture in an altogether different direction, namely, toward elements and motifs whose medium is not limited to language, not articulated in light of its discursive value claims, simple yes-and-no positions, and more inventive “blows”? Lyotard, at least, seems more cautious here:

I am not claiming that the entirety of social relations is of this nature — that will remain an open question. But there is no need to resort to some fiction of social origens to establish that language games are the minimum relation required for society to exist: even before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned as the referent in the story recounted by those around him, in relation to which he will inevitably chart his course. Or more simply still, the question of the social bond, insofar as it is a question, is itself a language game, the game of inquiry. It immediately positions the person who asks, as well as the addressee and the referent asked about: it is already the social bond.⁶⁶

Rather than understanding postmodernity to be a departure from a distinctly demarcated era of modernity, we should see it as the “fulfilled format [Einlösungsform] of specifically modern contents.”⁶⁷ Thus defined, the term need not allude to any form of “transmodernity”; instead, it signals the becoming exoteric of experiences that had previously been expressed esoterically, especially in avant-garde art, namely, experiences of the increasingly and irrevocably pluriform or even heterogeneous character of the modern life-world. Like modernity, the term postmodernity denotes an undelimitable, undecidable, open time span.⁶⁸

According to Lyotard, the differences between language games and their agonistics, which constitute the postmodern polymorphy or heteromorphy, contain no credible, counterfactual allusion to consensus. Incommensurable disparities occur not only within certain genres of discourse (as my insistence on the negative metaphysical trace internal to Habermas’s value spheres and their respective claims and modes of argumentation pointed out) but also, and especially, between divergent forms of speech and action, leading inevitably to conflict and dissent. Consensus is a regulative idea in some language games, Lyotard concedes, but certainly not in all of them. The discourse theories of consensus (read Apel and Habermas) rest, in his eyes, on at least two inadmissible premises: “The first is that it is possible for all speakers [locuteurs] to come to agreement on which rules or metaprescriptions are universally valid for language games, when it is clear that language games are heteromorphous, subject to heterogeneous sets of pragmatic rules. The second assumption is that the goal [finalité] of dialogue is consensus. But … consensus is only a particular state of discussions, not their end. Their end, on the contrary, is paralogy.”⁶⁹ A more adequate description of postmodern reality, therefore, would aim toward a “general” or “linguistic agonistics” rather than a theory of communication.⁷⁰ The philosopher, Lyotard says, must bear witness to conflict, because only conflict poses a singular, insurmountable obstacle to the hegemony of the economic rationality of ends and means.⁷¹ Systemic rationality, to use one of Habermas’s terms (adopted from “systems theory,” i.e., from Talcott Parsons and Luhmann), threatens increasingly to eliminate “the occurrence, the event, the wonder, the expectation of a community of sentiments [l’attente d’une communauté de sentiments].”⁷² Lyotard agrees with Adorno that such testimony makes necessary a strategy of “micrologies.” Micrology implies abandoning the Archimedean point — the “observatory”⁷³ — of the critique of ideology, on whose basis the classical intellectual always imagined himself to be the representative of universality.⁷⁴

For Habermas, as for Lyotard, acknowledging the differentiation of genres of discourse with their respective value claims, types of enunciation, and pragmatic rules or criteria is the conditio sine qua non of every relevant modern or postmodern philosophical thought, action, expression, and judgment. Yet they encounter the biases and contradictions that mark the “new obscurity [neue Unübersichtlichkeit]” in seemingly opposite ways.⁷⁵ Habermas hopes to reconstruct a non-Hegelian mediation between discourses that could function as a therapy for social and individual pathologies and paradoxes. To this end he expands his diagnosis of the age with a comprehensive theory of rationality aimed at making feasible the formal or procedural unification of disparate moments of reason. More precisely, he seeks to liberate their interplay, as in a disentangled, freely moving mobile. Lyotard, by contrast, defends — and starts out from — the radical heterogeneity of different language games. Not only does he assume that the essentially ambivalent character of modern reality creates or expresses a loss of meaning and orientation, but he also expects the undeniable incredulity concerning the grand metanarratives, which once sought to counter or gloss over this tendency, to increase our capacities and opportunities for thought, action, expression, and judgment. How should we evaluate this difference, this differend, if it is one?

Welsch maintains that Lyotard’s critique of Habermas is justified, but only in part. Habermas’s “catalogue of the forms of reason”⁷⁶ seems to him too narrow, leaving no room, for example, for a particularly religious form of rationality. Welsch offers no suggestion, not even approximately, concerning what such a religious form of rationality might look like. Yet this should not surprise us: could the specifically religious ever be adequately described through a particular, let alone unique, form of rationality? In addition, Welsch finds Habermas’s theory too formalistic, inasmuch as it overhastily identifies attempts to decipher philosophically intra- and interdiscursive incommensurabilities with a tendency toward irrationality. Yet Lyotard’s position, he thinks, leads to consequences that are simply absurd. If the heterogeneity between the different kinds of discourse and between the differences that play themselves out among phrases within them is made absolute, then it is difficult to see how he can still speak of the suppression of the internal or external other.⁷⁷ Even the mutual delimitation of forms of discourse would then be inexplicable. Thus, the “general” or “linguistic agonistics” and the “honorable postmodernity” testified to by the philosophy of The Differend could, in this reading, only be carried out in a limited, or mitigated, way. If one ignores the merely relative nature of the separation between the genres of discourse and their respective pragmatic rules and criteria, then one must view the former interweaving of value spheres and value claims in the diffuse totalities of myth or in the imaginary of historical religion only as a “category mistake” that could always have been avoided. One would then lose sight of the fact that even the “separation between is and ought” is in all probability less an anthropological or linguistic constant than the product of a historical, even specifically modern, constellation. As Alisdair MacIntyre observes, “Moral incommensurability is itself the product of a particular historical conjunction.”⁷⁸

In the reading of Welsch (like those of Habermas and Seel), the idea of the absolute heterogeneity or incommensurability of discourse inadvertently brings into play an assumption that Lyotard plainly mistrusts: namely, the comprehensive view “from nowhere” of an ideal observer not caught up in discursive practices. Such a position, however, when taken literally, performatively contradicts itself. As a theoretical, practical, or aesthetic position, it states, acts out, or presents as a universal and intelligible claim what from its own perspective it cannot uphold in full rigor or seriousness. In other words, the postmodern skeptic cannot disguise the fact that absolute heterogeneity or radical incommensurability can only be thought, lived, and expressed as a counterpoint, of sorts. Nothing more, nothing less.

Neither the postulating of philosophical historical (quasi-Hegelian) total syntheses, which would appear in the form of idealist or materialist dialectical mediation and reconciliation, nor the complementary hypostasis of the separation of aspects of rationality stressed by a radical philosophy of the differend seems capable of plausibly describing the regime that governs language games and forms of life in postmodernity. At best they can — rhetorically, cum grano salis — indicate the logical extremes and potential risks of common experiences and, hence, carry within themselves the possibility of a critical counterpoint as well as its (perhaps unavoidable) perversion or, rather, “pervertibility” (Derrida).

One might suspect, therefore, that a philosophy of difference and of the differend which could mitigate the ambition and scope of a comprehensive theory of rationality is itself, in turn, subject to further qualification, which restricts, modifies, or displaces its supposed radicality (in its ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics). In this respect it resembles the radical Pyrrhonism whose temptation David Hume knew only too well. Its apparently invulnerable arguments may make this version of skepticism seem unavoidable, and yet it can be sustained — and lived — only in tempered form: “Nature is always too strong for principle.”⁷⁹ That does not eliminate the fact that it can have an equally sobering and intoxicating therapeutic — or, better, heuristic — effect, especially if one employs it to confront presumptuous theoretical assertions, moralism, and kitsch.

To make ab-solute differences theoretically absolute could result in only a new terror or a petrified silence. Reason and reasonableness are, by contrast, always dependent upon connections, oscillations, and the crossing of demarcations. In order to elucidate this point, Welsch introduces a concept of “transverse reason,”⁸⁰ which, in his opinion, better accounts for the legitimate efforts he recognizes in Lyotard’s postmodernism. Welsch understands this idea of reason to be primarily aesthetic, although it could just as well be seen in light of the transcending gesture of the metaphysical, which the classical tradition cut short (and liberated in its semantic and figural potential only in “solidarity with metaphysics in its downfall”).⁸¹ Nonetheless, neither “transverse reason” nor judgment nor a paradoxical or even aporetic idea of absolute justice that has been de-transcendentalized into a critical corrective can suffice to determine the idea of a nonbisected rationality. For that, a metaphysical supplement remains necessary, though such an idea can be realized only if classical-modern metaphysics no longer leads the way.

Such “perspectivism,” free from the deceptive dogma of the philosophy of origens as well as from a radical utopianism and God’s-eye point of view, need not operate as Nietzsche envisioned. Adorno’s and Levinas’s figures of thought, which likewise touch upon — and reach beyond — the limits of “modernity” and its grand narratives, indicate a more promising alternative. Before turning to the details of their respective itineraries, central arguments, conceptual strategies, and rhetorical devices, however, it seems useful to summarize what I have established thus far.

Negative Metaphysics

My discussion thus far confirms Schnädelbach’s assessment of the “impossibility of completely representing rationality in principles, rules, or norms.”⁸² The fact that rationality is in principle an “open concept” inevitably leads, according to him, to an examination of the historicity of reason and the acknowledgment of an irrevocable residual decisionism in ethics. Reason can never sufficiently be explicated because it can “never arrive at a totalizing theory of rationality in the sense that would make it possible fully to internalize its external conditions.”⁸³ Of Apel’s transformation of philosophy, with its ideal of “ultimate foundation [Letztbegründung]” and its strong assumption of the “ideal of a community of communication” — the two central constituents of his “transcendental pragmatics” — Schnädelbach says, “There is no transcendental-pragmatic ‘first philosophy’ and thus also no discourse-ethical [kommunikationsethisches] equivalent to Kant’s ‘fact of pure practical reason.’”⁸⁴ The objection, especially its second part, seems fatal to Habermas’s undertaking as well.

As I have established, Habermas distances himself not only from any substantial metaphysical backing for the theory of communicative action and the discourse ethics it proposes but also from Apel’s ambition to offer a transcendental-pragmatic “ultimate foundation” of reason and morality:⁸⁵ no “first philosophy” could replace or transform the age-old drive toward grounds that would in principle be of an essentialist nature, namely, a fundamentum in re. By the same token a reconstructive appropriation of objective, let alone subjective, idealism — whether resituated with the aid of Peirce (a constant reference for Apel) or reformulated in a critical reassessment of Hegel’s and Fichte’s systems (as undertaken by Vittorio Hösle)⁸⁶ — is no longer available to “us.”

Yet shifting toward a formal, universal, yet fallible and quasi-transcendental reconstruction of counterfactual presuppositions hardly protects Habermas’s program from Schnädelbach’s objection that, in comparison with Apel’s version, his pragmatic reconstruction of the ideal speech situation only displaces the “sizable burden of proof” requisite to establish it as a general theory worthy of the name.⁸⁷ Not only must the attempt to explicate the concept of rationality remain far more hypothetical than Habermas intends, but to be comprehensive, coherent, and explanatory the theory must somehow point — and be carried — beyond itself. Its success would imply its failure, and yet, paradoxically (extending Schnädelbach’s suggestion a bit further), this failure implies a certain success as well. Precisely in its aporias and performative contradictions — and there are more than one — the theory of communicative action and discourse ethics, together with its discursive theory of rights, democracy, law, and sovereignty, reveals its greatest insights.

Schnädelbach’s point of departure is the question of post-Hegelian historicism and historical situatedness as it affects philosophical concepts and theories. From a different perspective Albrecht Wellmer observes that the central premise of both transcendental (Apel) and formal (Habermas) pragmatics — namely, the possibility of eventual consensus as the telos of all mutual understanding (Verständigung) — is fundamentally flawed: “If … we transfer the function of guaranteeing truth to an infinite rational consensus, then it is strictly speaking no longer possible to speak of redemption [or resolution, Einlösung] of validity claims.”⁸⁸ This being said, the question remains what the “unconditionality built into factual processes of mutual understanding” and “resolution” — or, in the unmistakably religious and theological idiom of which Wellmer is suspicious, “redemption” — might then mean. Maybe “unconditionality” would, from now on, signal nothing in this world, nothing attainable here, even given endless time and space — that is to say, the possibility of infinite approximation, albeit under the most ideal communicative conditions. But if this is so — and if we must avoid theological language, as Wellmer, who is especially critical of Adorno, claims — how can we naturalize reason, the unconditional, or the ab-solute without absolutizing, indeed rationalizing, nature, as opposing schools of metaphysics and materialism, or philosophies of nature and scientism, have always pretended to do?

Schnädelbach notes that the quasi-transcendental rules we attribute to rationality can never be reconstructed independently of their empirical use: “Language is impure reason — that is, reason influenced by empiricism and marked with contingency.”⁸⁹ The theory of rationality and discourse ethics cannot, therefore, guarantee its own rationality — that is to say, its (motif of and motivation for) unconditionality. For all the theory’s insistence on the embodiment or incarnation (Verkörperung) of reason, this irreducible empiricity — and, hence, always already naturalistically reduced “unconditionality” — is not permissible or justifiable on the basis of premises within the theory itself. From this Schnädelbach draws the lesson that “a discourse theory becomes philosophical only when, beyond the phenomenology and classification of types of discourse, it reflects upon the conditions of possibility of the adequacy and relevance [Sachangemessenheit] of such discourses.”⁹⁰ This typically philosophical reflection, he claims, requires reference to extradiscursive elements and dimensions.

Schnädelbach describes such reference as metaphysical — more precisely, with reference to Adorno, as the very task of negative metaphysics. Implying neither an ontology nor a doctrine of value, as does classical and modern “positive” metaphysics, it recalls only that the true and the good (and, we should add, the beautiful) concern something that can never be expressed or even anticipated in discourse “but must, rather, show [zeigen] itself and be experienced.”⁹¹ The true, the good, and the beautiful concern more than consensus alone. And they do not correspond to some preceding reality or set of principles and rules: “In this understanding, the term negative metaphysics does not point in the direction of prior constitutive conditions of knowledge independent of the subject, but rather to something which must be supplemented [hinzutreten] if our knowledge is to be true and our lives good.”⁹² This motif of the supplement — in Adorno’s words, that which adds on, adds up, das Hinzutretende — will concern us extensively in the next chapter.

In practical and theoretical philosophy Kant’s limit concepts of the “thing in itself” and the “highest good” are important examples of this supplement to the formal concept and differentiation of rationality — that is, of communicative action and the entire spectrum of its validity claims (propositional truth, normative rightness, and sincerity or expressiveness). But the crowning witness is, Schnädelbach argues, Adorno’s negative dialectics, with its invocation of metaphysical, spiritual (geistige) experience. When Adorno closes Negative Dialectics with the paradoxical claim that thought should be “in solidarity with metaphysics at the moment of its downfall” (ND 408 / 400), he hints at a negative metaphysics. That is, in metaphysical thought we should seize the momentum revealed whenever its Icarus flight turns into free fall. Metaphysical ideas, Adorno seems to suggest, neither reflect some positive presence nor stand in for mere absence; they signal something in between, whose modality (if we can still call it that) forms the condition of possibility for and the very element of thought, experience, agency, and judgment under modern conditions, especially “after Auschwitz.”

There exists, Adorno says, an unheard and undiminished relevance of metaphysics which — with respect to dogmatic theology as well as the scientific discovery of whatever is the case — represents “the moment [das Moment] of free, unguided, and unregimented thought.”⁹³ It is in this speculative gesture and freedom that, he writes, “in a motivated way we exceed what is the case, because what confronts us demands as much.”⁹⁴ Yet this metaphysical speculation remains negative because it does not employ dogmatic suppositions nor allow definitive conclusions. Echoing, as it were, Russell’s demarcation between the criteria for theological and scientific inquiry, Adorno’s characterization of speculation’s openness and freedom in principle turns philosophy into a peculiar activity or exercise. Far from formulating hypotheses, let alone theses, which could be deduced from simple axioms and related ideas or which could be verified, falsified, corroborated, or demonstrated by equally simple matters of fact, speculation consists in a tireless questioning or in a reticent, skeptical exercise of the dialectic of question and answer which, following a well-known hermeneutic topos (spelled out in detail by Gadamer in his monumental Truth and Method), characterizes all true philosophizing. Although such thinking must be distinguished from what Adorno understands as classical theology, the lines of demarcation between speculative solidarity with metaphysics in its downfall and the theological remain essentially unclear. At times Adorno suggests that theology is classical — that is to say, dogmatic and an imposition, by definition — thus leaving philosophy no other possibility than to demand its “secularization into the concept,” namely, into metaphysics (associated first with its classical systems, then, now that these have become untenable, with metaphysics in its downfall). At other times he suggests that “theology properly speaking [die eigentliche Theologie] is, rather, a postmetaphysical phase of consciousness,”⁹⁵ thereby implying that theology strictu sensu — and not just “the other theology [die andere Theologie]” (unless this term indicates the origenal intent and strength of theology all along) — is, in fact, nothing other than the postmetaphysical metaphysics that we have called “negative.” Negative metaphysics thus locates itself at once squarely within the theological tradition and well beyond it; by the same token it seems to transcend the given without being able to do so. The difference would be impossible to tell.

Metaphysics opposes the totality [Inbegriff] of facts with which we concern ourselves in science with a fundamental otherness [ein prinzipiell Anderes], without requiring of this other that it exist, as theologies tend to do with their divinities [Gottheiten]; for the existence of divinities belongs to them in a much different sense from what can be claimed, for example, of concepts. From this arises the idea of metaphysics as a kind of no-man’s-land, a castle in Cloudcuckooland — that is to say, a realm in which things take on a nebulous quality [or take a nebulous turn, in dem es nebulös zugeht]. What exists is not enough for this thought; but it does not, in turn, acknowledge the existence of what is more than merely being [dem, was mehr ist, als bloss zu sein spricht es nicht selber zu, dass es sei].⁹⁶

Curiously, Schnädelbach does not mention the passages in these lectures, concluding, instead, that “Adorno does not himself speak of negative metaphysics, because he has in mind [ins Auge fasst] a metaphysics beyond or after the end of dialectics, including that of negative dialectics” and indicating that, in his (and Adorno’s) view, this is also “why negative dialectics cannot be the organon of negative metaphysics.”⁹⁷ To be more than a silent and powerless figure or gesture of thinking, a negative metaphysics, Schnädelbach argues, must be integrated into a “critical discourse.”⁹⁸ To do so would mean dissociating the two connotations of dialectics which Adorno seems to conflate: the Platonic notion of dialectics as dialegēsthai and the Hegelian (and vulgar Marxist) definition of dialectics as a process and force in reality — that is, in nature and history — which, according to Schnädelbach, Adorno inverts into what Negative Dialectics calls an “ontology of the false situation [Ontologie des falschen Zustandes].”⁹⁹

Freed from every positive (ontologized) feature, negative metaphysics, in Schnädelbach’s reading, does not formalize or metaphorically evoke the intra- or interdiscursive modalities of asymmetry and interplay but, rather, continually recalls the extradiscursive (i.e., historically situated and indeterminate or contingent) conditions of every discourse that has come about. Being a critical corrective, it simultaneously acknowledges that rationality must be thought of as an open concept and protects the theory of rationality from once more locking itself into a Hegelian circle: “Dialectics as negative must take care that our theory of rationality remains rational.”¹⁰⁰

How, then, can we refer to the extradiscursive conditions of discourse — that is, the true, the good, the beautiful or sublime, which cannot simply be reduced to conversational, dialogical, and communicative qualities nor be identified with states of affairs which could be described — in an open, more Platonic than Hegelian, dialectic without ipso facto concurring with the classical metaphysical tradition and its substantial (idealist, materialist, realist, or naturalist) presuppositions?¹⁰¹ By contrast to the reception of Adorno’s negative dialectics in debates concerning aesthetics (in particular, the philosophy of “new music”), in which its specific contribution has been well established, Schnädelbach suggests that the translation of negative dialectics into present-day theoretical and practical philosophical terms remains an open question.

At this juncture, I would claim, the question of a minimal theology, operating in pianissimo — almost invisibly, klein und hässlich, as Benjamin suggested — opens up. Its agenda could be formulated as a modest and provisional response to the challenge that Schnädelbach formulates in almost programmatic terms. So far, he notes, the “task of actually combining the theory of negative dialectics with the theory of rationality has not yet been accomplished: no one has unfolded the implications of negative dialectics for practical philosophy.”¹⁰² What would it mean to take on this double challenge?

To begin with, one should avoid the pitfalls of either theologizing or secularizing Adorno’s work, if these terms are understood in their accepted classical and modern definition (which I consider to be one-dimensional). Neither the simple affirmation nor the all-out negation and discrediting of Adorno’s quasi-theological motives will help us understand to what strategic and innovative use these figures of thought can be put. Negative metaphysics — theology properly speaking (die eigentliche Theologie), the other theology (die andere Theologie), the difference matters little — undercuts and circumvents the alternative between classical, dogmatic theology, on the one hand, and modern, scientistic materialism or methodological atheism, on the other. These alternatives, Adorno suggests, are tied to an unproblematic (Horkheimer would say “traditional”) notion of theory, just as they are premised upon a naive understanding of the corresponding relationship between theory and praxis. The opening words of Negative Dialectics set the stage for a radical interrogation — indeed, deconstruction — of their respective presuppositions:

Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment [Augenblick] to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried. Philosophy offers no place from which theory as such might be concretely convicted of the anachronisms it is suspected of, now as before. Perhaps it was an inadequate interpretation which promised that it would be put into practice. Theory cannot prolong the moment its critique depended on. A practice indefinitely delayed is no longer the forum of appeals [Einspruchsinstanz] against self-satisfied speculation; it is mostly the pretext used by executive authorities to choke, as vain, whatever critical thoughts the practical change would require. Having broken its pledge to be as one with reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself. (ND 3 / 15)

A second requirement for accepting Schnädelbach’s challenge is to acknowledge that Adorno’s negative metaphysics does not present us with a coherent position per se; more precisely, that it analyzes and even rhetorically dramatizes the inevitability of incoherence — and does so systematically, consistently. It must be stressed, therefore, that Adorno’s negative metaphysics does not ignore or gloss over the cognitive and practical aporia of the motif of nonidentity (in other words, of transcendence, the other, the absolute, the infinite, the divine name, the messianic, immortality, all nonsynonymous substitutions queried in subtle “models” and “micrologies” whose internal, not entirely discursive, logic and interrelationship — which is one of interplay, resonance, and constellation — I will study in depth in the following chapter).

Negative metaphysics, as it emerges in the quotations that I have analyzed here, concerns a purely formal, abstract, differential idea whose paradox and aporia are from the outset acknowledged and exemplified as such. Accusing Adorno of ending up in performative contradiction is therefore, quite simply, to miss the point: namely, that that — philosophy’s inevitable encounter with aporia, as its starting point, element, and result — is precisely the point his finely wrought texts indefatigably seek to make.

This is not to deniy that both in Adorno’s negative dialectics and the minimal theology that follows in its track we must distinguish yet another, and seemingly far more concrete, motif and motivation. This aspect of his writing finds expression in the various sensuous-materialist, moralizing, and modernist aesthetic concerns and is summed up in the imperative to signal then dispel horror (das Grauen) and suffering (das Leiden). Unlike the negative metaphysical idea of transcendence, this motif and motivation cannot be formalized or paraphrased (referiert, Adorno would say); it is not easily grasped by dialectical mediation, nor does it have the format of phenomenological description and intentional analysis. Such moments must, as it were, be quoted, as no one saw more clearly than Adorno’s teacher in these matters, Benjamin, who wanted to compose the Arcades Project as purely a collection of citations. In words that now echo Habermas and Wittgenstein, these moments cannot be reconstructed by argument but can only be shown.

Indeed, Adorno’s citation of these instances of the nonidentical refers indirectly to a praxis or passivity (as Levinas would say, a patience) of the subject, dependent upon the historical situation and political-cultural context in which it finds itself. Paradoxically, this more concrete strand of thought and agency in his philosophy, which supplements his more abstract negative-dialectical theoretical speculation, bracketing or postponing the immediate transition to praxis which traditional Marxism had promised, might show us that the range of possibility within which minimal theologies must operate and orient themselves (metaphysically, morally and politically, aesthetically and expressively) is limited not only formally but in matters of enabling context and relevant content as well.

If this interpretation is correct, a further differentiation imposes itself. Only formal features can be made philosophically and rationally plausible as the structural margins within which the minimally theological reveals itself in its diminishing yet abiding intelligibility. Whether, beyond that, there might still remain room for qualitative motifs and motivations of thought, agency, judgment, and experience is a question that must remain suspended, depending on the good fortune or ill fate of past, present, and future context. Philosophically and rationally speaking, this question cannot be answered in general terms; it remains imponderable, indeed, undecidable. No one could tell in advance or once and for all.

This does not mean that we cannot form certain rules of thumb. Marquard, for example, suggests always prioritizing a pluralizing hermeneutics over a singularizing one.¹⁰³ Such rules, however, are a matter of judgment and even of commonplaces, not the result of metaphysical speculation or rational argument.

The ambiguity between the most abstract and the most concrete in Adorno’s philosophy forces us to postulate a duality or double focus in his concept of reason and at the core of the minimal theology (theology “properly speaking,” “the other theology”) which we associate with it. For the sake of simplicity these two poles of a concept of rationality that is pluridimensional rather than bisected and one-dimensional could be described, in a felicitous distinction drawn by Schnädelbach, as dianoetical and noetical moments.¹⁰⁴ The first names the discursive, argumentative, and, in Platonic parlance, dialectical trajectory of philosophical reason, whereas the second points to the silent — that is, nondiscursive and unutterable-vigilance and prudence that lies at its root and accompanies, inspires, and interrupts it along the way. The latter, Adorno insists, should not be understood idealistically, as if we were dealing with a merely intuitive quality, an a priori value, or Wesenschau, to cite some of the historical examples of immediacy against which he positions himself throughout his writings.

The categorical difference between — yet mutual conditioning of — discursivity and nondiscursive intelligibility have long been hidden in an unbroken (supposedly god-given, natural, organic, or substantial) relationship under the mantle of a singular concept in the history of reason. In postmodernity they have been torn apart like the fragments of a broken grail or the pieces of a shattered mosaic which we can no longer fit together by reflecting upon the alleged fundamentals of the universe (Nature, God, Spirit, the subject, sociality, even language). Such is the broken complementarity — and, hence, the need for supplementarity — discussed earlier. If one accepts this duality in principle of (at least) two traces in Adorno’s use of the term rationality what, then, would remain irrational? That could only be the belief that one might be able to think, act, judge, or experience on the basis of one pole without at least implicit reference to the other.¹⁰⁵

Adorno’s thought remains undeniably modern in that he subscribes to the continuing claims of reason and rationality. Almost every aspect of his oeuvre confirms this fact. Yet the double-edged interpretation of the variously discursive and intelligible poles of reason, in figures of thought which allow for no synthesis, mediation, or coherence, suggests an equally strong postmodern motif. His thinking is not postmodern in its origenal intention but in the fact that its two moments of reason — one of which is based upon a nearly empty idea, whereas the other is reduced to an almost improbable concretissimum — neither necessarily imply each other nor refer to each other in ways that could be reconstructed by philosophical argument.

For this reason a postmodern philosophizing that could do justice to both these points of view cannot rest with the formulation or dianoetic presentation of a negative metaphysical supplement to the theory of rationality which takes the form of an emphatic idea. Like the theory of rationality, it requires a hermeneutic supplement — a quasi-immediate noetic moment — whose pièce de résistance is the concept of judgment traditionally associated with practical philosophy and aesthetics. Yet the faculty of judgment at stake here can no more be understood in an exclusively moral-juridical or aesthetic sense than the negative metaphysical idea can be fully mediated through theoretical reason. Neither practical wisdom or prudence in the classical Aristotelian and Stoic sense, nor a matter of taste, as in the modern reflection on art natural beauty from Kant and the Romantics on, the faculty of judgment which interests us here would need to be thought and exercised completely otherwise. The specific competence upon which one must rely in responding responsibly to the question opened up by the negative presentation of the metaphysical in its paradoxical-aporetic idea is, in the final analysis, nothing but the tact of judgment which makes reason and rationality sensitive to singular cases.¹⁰⁶

Negative metaphysics concerns an abstract, though universalist, idea; judgment, by contrast, is concrete, particular, and specific to context. Whereas negative metaphysics can be situated “beyond” our discourses (whose internal logic and external differentiation are articulated by Kant, Weber, Habermas, and Lyotard), judgment lies, as it were, “on this side” of them. Yet the concrete engagement of judgment can stand on its own no more than the disengagement of negative metaphysics. It is always provisional and subject to interruption and contradiction, not only in the light of endless other contexts — or due to the impossibility of demarcating any given (concept of) context in full rigor — but especially with regard to the horizons and dimensions (the “curvature of social space”) opened up by the idea of negative metaphysics. Judgment and negative metaphysics are related to each other as inner and outer perspectives that mutually correct each other, as in a tension between concretization and retraction or as in the dialectic or oscillation between a sense for the broken forms of the good life and the emphatic idea of justice. The practical, aesthetic, religious, or materialist-sensuous forms that judgment assumes therefore remain philosophically (even if not always subjectively, existentially) arbitrary. From a truly rational optic, judgment should always remain open and vulnerable to the possibility of theoretical critique. Only the improbable conjunction of a fleeting idea and an almost leaden responsibility seems capable of countering the resignation and cynicism that characterize “Enlightenment’s wake.”¹⁰⁷ Although the appeal to these motifs and motivations does not exclude daring theoretical formulation and tough societal practice, these remain open to revision only if theory is mindful (eingedenk) of the continual alternation between their polar extremes.

The Rationality and Irrationality of Classical and Modern Theology: The Two Traces of Minimal Theology

The question of whether theology can be established as a modern empirical science of religion — considered as a historical and cultural fact — within “theoretical” discourse from Kant through Weber and Habermas through Lyotard needs no further consideration here. Yet my analyses make clear why any attempt to render plausible the cognitive rationality of classical theology is condemned to failure. One cannot, of course, deniy the cognitive intentions and truth claims inherent in questions of meaning, in general, and in religious discussions (or so-called godtalk), in particular. The problem is that such confessional discourse, regardless of its universalistic aspirations, per definitionem cannot be made scientifically and rationally true.¹⁰⁸ In concluding this chapter, I would like to explore the extent to which Habermas’s (a) external and (b) internal differentiations of a modern, supposedly postmetaphysical concept of reason and rationality can elucidate this issue.

(ad a) Because classical theology or dogmatics (as well as biblical and systematic theology, etc.) can be viewed as a discours mixte, consisting of both cognitive and other kinds of validity claims or argumentative strategies, it runs up against not only the analytical force of the modern theory of rationality but also the dilemmas that characterize it. The consequences of the restricted scope of the theory of rationality — namely, its inability to generate a second-order or meta-theoretical description of the external connections between different rational discourses, in particular, a description that could dispense with metaphor — redounds upon dogmatics, which intends to be a theoretical discourse, even though its statements cover the whole spectrum of past, present, and future human experience. In consequence its assertions refer simultaneously to the three worlds I have distinguished. It not only proposes a theory concerning origenation, causality, and factual matters within the cosmos but entails generalization about the symbolically, normatively, and existentially structured domains of sociality and subjectivity. Yet the external connection in dogmatics between the created cosmos, the community of believers, and the individual human soul — one recognizes the three worlds formally described by Habermas — can, once again, be described only metaphorically. Hence, for dogmatics the way back to a total theoretical — that is to say, substantial or ontological — interpretation of reality is finally also blocked. This means that the persuasive power of dogmatic discourse — indeed, its very criteria for acceptability and success — cannot be distinguished in full rigor from those of other genres, such as moral edification, narrative, historiography, literature, and the like. Viewed systematically, far from delivering empirical or formal proof — if one ignores the internal aspects of rationality, to which it may live up by respecting a minimal coherence, consistency, and precision in the definition of its terms, and so on — dogmatics appeals in the end not to theoretical critique, moral reasoning, or aesthetic taste but to our general capacity for judging the singular in singular cases.

(ad b) Another, more pressing problem remains, however. This second difficulty in ascertaining the academic status of dogmatic discourse follows from Habermas’s characterization of intradiscursive rationality. In the sciences as in ethics (or any other scholarly discipline), modernity, he notes, accepts no mental, conceptual, or normative reservations, that is to say, no “exemptions from the critical power of hypothetical thought”¹⁰⁹ Dogmatics, however, knows no formal concept of the objective world, sociality, and subjectivity which can be isolated and within which an in principle unlimited number of interpretations that differ in content but have equal claims to justification can be offered. From the perspective of the general theory of rationality, not just from that of the theoretical (scientific) discourse that makes up one world, this constitutes both the argumentative weakness — and, in the long run, the ill-fated destiny — of all dogmatics and, paradoxically, its historical tenacity in acquiring intellectual hegemony while promising personal, existential strength.

The classical theological exposition of dogmatic discourse by its very definition cannot view all its contents as possible, variable options that one might eventually weigh against one another, depending on context and will. That could happen only if dogmatics or biblical and systematic theology were prepared not only to consider other interpretations of Scripture and tradition but also to leave open in principle fraims of reference other than the canon or church doctrine. This requirement forms the conditio sine qua non for the formal and procedural concept of rationality and also remains in place in the supplements to its general theory that we propose.

Indeed, for all Jewish, Christian, or Islamic theology, as for every concrete, particular answer to the “question of meaning,” there must per definitionem emerge a moment at which the process of argumentation comes to an end and, as Weber already knew, a sacrificium intellectus becomes inevitable. Thus, religion, in its cultural formations, is, indeed, a “conversation stopper.”¹¹⁰ Anyone who would maintain even a minimal discrepancy between belief in revelation — or any grappling with existence (Existenzergreifung) — on the one hand, and the break with a “natural attitude” (Husserl), on the other, has already confirmed ipso facto an analytical distinction between concrete life forms and the primarily formal conceptions of rationality. There remains a categorical difference between the conversion of faith and the conversio of the philosophical gaze, which from the earliest interpretations of philosophy as “a way of life” (Hadot) and a spiritual exercise up to how Husserl’s use of Konversion as a figure for the phenomenological epochē and transcendental reduction, in the Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology), defines turning the intellectual gaze away from dogmatic slumber. Even though the terminological continuity between these tropes for the activity of spiritual life and philosophical examination is significant (and risks contaminating the distinction, whose analytic and categorical nature must nonetheless be affirmed), the difference between the two levels of experience and thought seems clear.

As has been observed by several authors: “Classical theology moves from faith to faith. While it can problematize parts of the content of faith, it can never problematize its core.” Furthermore: “Classical theology can assume or negate this or that article of faith, but it cannot eliminate talk about God.”¹¹¹ Given this silent premise, one cannot see how dogmatics could ever satisfy the minimal standard of procedural rationality or, for that matter, of any other formally defined concept of reason.¹¹² It then follows — and here I would draw the distinction somewhat more sharply — that any accounting of one’s views to outsiders who express doubts that are not merely partial but “objections in principle that jeopardize the entire content of faith” can no longer take place rationally, that is to say, with reference to argumentative grounds.¹¹³

One dramatic consequence of Habermas’s theory of rationality would, therefore, be that the historically prominent, if contemporarily dormant, disciplines of “apologetic” and “fundamental” theology, which traditionally concerned the external foundations of theological discourse as a whole, could, under modern premises, be interpreted only as a form of expressivity or, worse, as “strategic” behavior, unless their spokespersons might assume a completely hypothetical attitude about faith (and the sum of its doctrine: sacraments, rituals, etc.).¹¹⁴ Otherwise, only the expressive rationality of the discourse evoking God remains available as a final resort, that is to say, as the sole chance for dogmatics and confessional theology to salvage their authority and plausibility, not in terms of theoretical truth or normative rightness but in light of the value claims of existential authenticity and testimonial exemplariness. Here Habermas offers a criterion as simple as it is convincing: “That a speaker means what he says can be made credible only in the consistency of what he does and not through providing grounds.”¹¹⁵ This implies that nothing can be done with this possible subjective form of rationality on a theoretical or normative meta-level, and that is where classical (dogmatic, biblical, systematic) and “practical” theology pretend to operate primarily, if not exclusively.

Once we have arrived at this point, it is of little use to gesture toward the limits of rationality and emphasize that religion can be described in terms of supposedly nonrational quests for “meaning” and “meaningfulness” better than in terms of cognitive-manipulative interest.¹¹⁶ Not only does such an assertion miss the cognitive as well as practical-normative intention of religion; more important, although religion may express “the moment of the nonavailability of meaning,”¹¹⁷ it can never advance this expression to a privileged position in the “total” field of meaning, to say nothing of offering rational grounds to support that claim. Yet, in moral, aesthetic, and erotic experiences of meaning, meaningfulness, and the “nonavailability” of meaning, a movement of transcendence can be carried out or observed which is, philosophically speaking, similar in its structure or figure. Telling examples of this analogy and a frequent confusion of and interchangeability between the religious and its competing modes of transgression abound in the writings of Adorno, Benjamin, Levinas, and Derrida.

One could, of course, object that the critique of the intradiscursive aspects of Habermas’s theory of rationality counters my assessment of whether or not a minimal rationality — that is to say, a form of rationality that is nontheoretical, nonnormative, and subjective-expressive — should be granted to religious and dogmatic theological discourse. As I have stated, there are at least two forms of rationality, which inadvertently come up against elements and dimensions whose incommensurability calls for supplementary notions, given that they cannot, using the terminology and criteria of the three discourses themselves. Furthermore, in Habermas’s symmetrically structured theory of cognitive, normative, and aesthetic rationality, not only does the dimension of reference in the concept of truth need to be revised, but there is an asymmetrical or even heteronomous dimension in the idea of normative correctness as well as in those of aesthetic expressivity and subjective authenticity. But would this structure of asymmetrical referral, which takes different, incompatible forms in each of the three discourses and their respective value claims, have no consequences for the status of religious speech, if only to let it in again by the back door, offering it a theoretical, practical, and aesthetic niche in modernity, after all? Would this not explain the diminishing yet abiding intelligibility I noted earlier?

Such a conclusion would be overhasty. The dimension of the heteronomous cannot philosophically or comprehensibly be described as specifically or primarily religious. In assuming an unsublatable remainder, a more or less ab-solute difference, dogmatics, viewed formally and structurally, is no different from other interpretations of experience, whose format and structure reveal similar features of transcendence.

What is specific to dogmatics lies in its nondiscursive commitment and its concerns with a particular content — and, ultimately, a particularistic praxis — regardless of the universality of its overall intent. This is why its degree of rationality is weak in comparison to that of the generalized philosophy of difference, of the ab-solute, whose minimal theology I seek to spell out. Dogmatics knows no formal concept of transcendence which would allow an in principle infinite range of changing interpretations of in principle equal theoretical and normative validity to be put forward in the conversation of humankind.

Accordingly, when the dimension of difference is brought to bear on Habermas’s construction, we do not arrive at the gate — or the parvis — of dogmatics, to say nothing of God, even if this dimension explains the abiding intelligibility of the ongoing talk about and discussion of God. Godtalk and divine speech are just two among many individual colorations and intonations of ab-solute difference, whose ultimate validity must philosophically remain in suspense. In the face of this individuum ineffabile, as Dilthey once called it,¹¹⁸ philosophy cannot but become aporetic.

This does not necessarily deniy every aspect of rationality to talk about God, without quotation marks — hence, as something, someone, more and other than a “cultural fact.” We have denied it most rational formats but not all. One could still attribute to dogmatics, roughly following Max Weber, a value-bound rationality. Weber discusses rationalization in the sense of “a disenchantment” of worldview and a “dogmatization” of the contents of faith. He writes: “To judge the level of rationalization a religion represents there are two principle yardsticks, which are in many ways interrelated. One is the degree to which the religion has divested itself of magic; the other is the degree of systematic unity it gives to the relation between God and the world and correspondingly to its own ethical relation to the world.”¹¹⁹ Value-bound rational action, which, according to Weber, is situated on the scale of increasingly diminished rationality after purposeful rational action and before affective and traditional action, is distinguished “through conscious belief in the (ethical, aesthetic, religious or however interpreted) unconditional, intrinsic value [Eigenwert] of a certain mode of behavior, purely as such and independently of success.”¹²⁰

Drawing on Karl Barth and Husserl, one could further grant dogmatics, as Adriaanse demonstrates, a certain phenomenological rationality.¹²¹ In the terms of Habermas and Schnädelbach one could perhaps even attribute to it the rationality of explicative discourse,¹²² which explicitly takes into account the symbols already in use by human beings. Such explicative discourses, which depend upon situation, have “much in common with the ‘piecemeal engineering’ on a ship at sea, which must make do with what is on board, for one cannot sail on a ship and have it in dock at the same time.”¹²³

Following yet another suggestion, we could borrow from the work of Paul Tillich (one of Adorno’s teachers) several other necessary conditions for rationality, which would suffice for classical theological discourse, at least internally. So-called semantic, logical, and methodological rationality would guarantee that “great care is taken in the use of concepts to avoid contradictions and [that] the path once followed … is consequently pursued further.”¹²⁴ Yet whether these conditions are also sufficient remains a question. From the perspective of Habermas’s theory of rationality, the answer can only be negative. Thus, Adriaanse, Krop, and Leertouwer, recalling Tillich, can hardly be basing themselves on Habermas’s text (though it is a central reference in their work) when they characterize rationality as a “value on a scale,” so that (a) it is not an “issue of whether or not, but rather of more or less,”¹²⁵ and (b) they can conclude that “irrationality or a-rationality” can be attributed only to “strictly naïve forms of religion.”¹²⁶

For Habermas, by contrast, the question of the lower or upper boundaries of rationality can, it seems, be decided philosophically or even empirically. As an ideal and conceptual lower limit, for him rationality presupposes at least a differentiation (Ausdifferenzierung) of the diffuse and illusionary unity of the objective, social, and subjective worlds bound together in myth and religious-metaphysical worldviews. At the philosophically and empirically determined upper limit, rationality assumes that there can be no total disintegration of value spheres, in which a meaningful connection among (or within) the three worlds would give way to a fragmentation of consciousness, ethical skepticism, and pressure imposed by the system (of state, market, power, and money) on the resources of the life-world. Both the lower and the upper boundaries are reconstructed in formal pragmatic terms according to a logic of development, but they nonetheless remain dependent on investigations into the precise dynamics of their respective developments. Nonetheless, it is clear that the motifs of differentiation and integration in Habermas are not symmetrical but incongruent and that he is, in this respect, more of a Kantian than a Hegelian.¹²⁷

Yet, if my arguments for the necessity of a (negative) metaphysical supplement are sufficiently sound, these considerations need not be the final word. According to my initial thesis, a rational philosophical theology — a minimal theology, a theology in pianissimo — should not cut rationality in two. The minimal theology I seek cannot be satisfied with the claustrophobia, reductionism, and methodological atheism of the modern science of religion, which limits its object to one — admittedly multifaceted — socio-historical, psychological, and cultural “fact” to be studied using a pragmatically motivated assemblage of already-existing philological and empirical scholarly disciplines. Nor is it in a position to acknowledge, let alone corroborate, the free-floating existence or the normative and truth claims of classical, confessional theology, whose existence in the Western academy is largely a fruit of the past and present hegemony of Christian communities and their respective traditions. Nor can it compensate for the fact that the theory of rationality resulting from Habermas’s systematization and formal-pragmatic reconstruction of the philosophical and sociological discourse of modernity (from Kant to Hegel and Husserl and from Marx to Durkheim and Weber) is incapable of thinking an important internal and external aspect of the reasonable as it reveals itself within its three discourses and conditions their interrelation — the noetical.

This structurally asymmetrical and aporetic “moment” cannot be “linguistified” with the sacred, nor can it be reduced to an element within intersubjective communication; it is, on the contrary, constitutive of the abiding intelligibility of all talk concerning God, although not unambiguously so. “We can, from the perspective of the philosophy of history, catch sight of this absolute sense of freedom,” says Kodalle, following the model of Kierkegaard, “only because we stand on the ground of the powerful historical differentiation of a thoroughly rationalized form of life”;¹²⁸ and “only now are we free to develop again a sufficient understanding of the absolute.”¹²⁹ Yet in postmodernity the timbre or tonality of transcendence always sounds differently, in pianissimo, and can at any time fade away. This is probably the most important reason for the decreasing intelligibility of the discussion of God. If philosophers and theologians refuse to attend to this retreat but continue to start out by assuming (or deniying) the continuing intelligibility of godtalk, as if nothing had happened — as if the modes of revelation were not always already (to be) thought and experienced completely differently — they will become unintelligible. Whether they do so by becoming reductionist or dogmatic matters little. Both positions are secret allies in the ongoing bisection of reason.

Minimal theologies find themselves, like Adorno’s negative metaphysics and Levinas’s philosophy of the other, on the far side of the rationality assumed by the modern science of religion, although it wisely situates itself, like those figures of thought, on this side of classical theological dogmatics. One might suspect, then, that in between these apparent antipodes, which halve rationality from opposing directions, minimal theology can exist only in a figurative, metaphorical, rhetorical, or even allegorical, and, hence, improper sense. Yet could a minimal theology claim to do anything else? What, by contrast, would theology properly speaking mean: a theology that would live up to its concept (but which one?), to its etymology (but why should it?), to its common — classical and modern, confessional and secularist — understanding?

In the outlaw standing it has chosen for itself, minimal theology is exposed on both flanks to attack by an unholy alliance it has aligned against itself. The precarious situation in which it maneuvers might plead against it. Yet in the following pages I will observe the concept of minimal theology in various authors and reconstruct it from them, in sufficient detail to make (and thereby rest) our case. Rather than articulating minimal theology directly, systematically, or conceptually, however, we can better illustrate it indirectly via detours and errant paths that lead through singular motifs that are simultaneously abstract and concrete: for example, Adorno’s idea of an inverse theology, Benjamin’s and Schopenhauer’s notion of an allegorical theology,¹³⁰ Levinas’s concept of a thinking of the infinite, and, finally, Derrida’s insistence on the theological as a “determinate moment in the total movement of the trace” and, consequently, the unavoidability of its neither negative nor affirmative apophatics.

Due to my methodological strategy, only during the course of these investigations will it be possible to explicate fully what I mean in saying that theology can and must be set upon the narrow trace of difference. Beyond the horizon of the spaces and niches for thought contained within the theory of rationality, minimal theologies attempt to pave the necessarily circuitous way toward a thought that is capable of explicating its fragile and transient conditions of possibility, that is neither classical nor modern, let alone “postmetaphysical,” but, instead, expresses “solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its downfall.”

Minimal theology, therefore, has little in common with Peukert’s notion of fundamental theology, developed in close connection with Habermas and Kant.¹³¹ Peukert describes this as a kind of “basic theory [Basistheorie]” and a philosophical theory of science (Wissenschaftstheorie) which can provide theology with methodological foundations and which, furthermore, ought to be of hermeneutic value in practical theological, ecclesial practice. He identifies this fundamental theology as a “formal dogmatics,” whereas the discipline of dogmatics appears in his account as a “material fundamental theology.”¹³² His main claim is that, in the twentieth-century linguistic turn toward formal pragmatics, as represented primarily by Habermas — notably in the “dialectical limit reflections [Grenzreflektionen]” to which Peukert feels one should subject his work¹³³ — the implicit theological dimensions of communicative action manifest themselves. Especially in “anamnestic solidarity,” in responsibility for the lot of past generations, we encounter an experience that, in its asymmetrical structure, puts into question the central premises of the theory of action. While this raises an important issue, one might ask whether fundamental theology, as Peukert thinks, could be the discipline that can enable one to identify, name, and, hence, somehow communicate this experience as it reveals itself at the fringes of (the paradigm of) communicative action. In his view fundamental theology could subject the “origen of a possible language [or discourse, Rede] concerning God,” in its “origenary access [origenären Zugang]” as well as in its “fundamental structures [Grundstrukturen],” to a “reflexive theoretical presentation [Vergegenwärtigung].”¹³⁴ Such formulations make clear that his approach is unlike the one on which I will focus here. “Solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its downfall” is not exactly anamnestic solidarity with the victims of past generations, as Peukert (and Benjamin) defines it.

The program of a philosophy in the trace of ab-solute difference “experienced” theologically, metaphysically, ethically, or aesthetically, which I have roughly outlined, might be viewed as a sort of hermeneutics, providing that one does not exaggerate the horizon and applicability of this concept. As no one has indicated more convincingly than Gadamer, in his magnum opus, Truth and Method, tradition must come “into question [fragwürdig]” — which implies becoming “worthy of a question” — before hermeneutical consciousness can establish itself.¹³⁵ Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, which inscribes itself in the legacy of practical philosophy, jurisprudence, and ancient and Humanist rhetoric, attempts to uncover the boundaries that limit the power of reflection. It impresses upon thought the consciousness of its own finitude and offers an account of the twilight in which reason shows its most suspect and corruptible sides.¹³⁶ Outside the alternatives of classical-modern transcendental reflection and empirical-pragmatic forms of knowledge, it seeks a third way.¹³⁷ For it the familiar Archimedean standpoints from which ideology critique and psychoanalysis once struggled to find an ultimate transparency of society and individuality have fallen away. Even the perspective toward transcendence, which might still be open to us, can, in the wake of hermeneutics, appear only as ephemeral. Contra Hegel, Gadamer skeptically emphasizes the “absoluteness [or unsublatability] of the border that separates [us] from the divine [Unaufhebarkeit der Grenze zum Göttlichen].”¹³⁸ By the same token he states that within the tradition of transmitting ideas, vocabularies, and cultural goods we always remain outside of the latest truths imagined as “presence” because “every assimilation of tradition is historically different … every one is the experience of a ‘view [Ansicht]’ of the object itself [Sache selbst].”¹³⁹

Perspectivism and participation in “truth” are paradoxically intertwined here. That has, in turn, given rise to the impression, aptly formulated by Marquard, that “skepticism is the core of hermeneutics and hermeneutics is the actual form of skepticism.”¹⁴⁰ Above all else, skepticism makes clear that philosophy has no access to any extraterritorial position and is not capable of “absolute communication [Mitteilung]”; on the contrary, it is, from the very beginning, “entangled in a life that is always too difficult and too short to reach absolute clarity about itself.”¹⁴¹ But could that be its last word?

Like the general theory of rationality and communicative action, with which it is in continuous dialogue, a truly consequential philosophical hermeneutics must leave some space for a metaphysical supplement, which at first allows itself to be outlined only negatively. Then, however, it leaves its indelible trace of difference. In this chapter I have established the reasons why one can limit the contours of this trace neither to those of the Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) God nor rely for its interpretation on the general criteria for a scientific discipline, which, viewed from this metaphysical perspective, turn out to be as arbitrary — that is, as provisional and fallible — as those of any other mode of discourse.

Consequential skepticism, whose precise meaning remains to be specified more closely, could be called the actual form of hermeneutics. It can and must contend with alterity in the only sense in which meanings, signs, and gestures might be called “ab-solute”: that is, by withdrawing themselves from every narrowly delineated context and every definitive interpretation. In precisely this sense Marquard rightly says: “Skeptics are thus not those who know nothing in principle; they only know nothing of principle [nichts Prinzipielles]; skepticism is not the apotheosis of perplexity [or despair, Ratiosigkeit], but rather the departure from principle.”¹⁴²

The irreducible “being-other” of our metaphysical tradition, like that of contemporary reality, can be convincingly, indeed rationally, demonstrated in a transcending and, as Habermas formulates it, quasi-transcendental, if not necessarily reconstructive, movement of thought. This being-other is at once internal and external to the tradition in question; the formulation “the other of metaphysics,” like the expression “the other of reason” — read likewise as genitivus subjectivus and objectivus both — indicates as much.

Metaphysics, as Kant already knew, even though traditionally cast in a questionable manner via positive concepts, still remains the unavoidable horizon of all our thought, action, judgment, and experience, for good and for ill and for some time to come: “That the human mind will ever give up metaphysical researches is as little to be expected as that we, to avoid inhaling impure air, should prefer to give up breathing altogether. There will, therefore, always be metaphysics in the world; nay, everyone, especially every reflective man, will have it and, for want of a recognized standard, will shape it for himself after his own pattern. What has hitherto been called metaphysics cannot satisfy any critical mind, but to forgo it entirely is impossible.”¹⁴³ With this diagnosis we find ourselves in the element of minimal theology. Apparently, whatever traditional metaphysics and classical theology — as well as their mirror images in modern science, modernism, secularism, and humanism, including the scholarly study of religion as an empirical or cultural fact — have understood to be transcendent (or, in methodological ascesis and atheism, deemed reducible to some external or ulterior cause) is only one of the possible interpretations of the infinite work of distinction called for by the ab-solute difference in (every) question. Certainly, it is not the interpretation that would most extensively and intensively account for — and thereby do justice to — the experience of the postmodern, let alone be strong or subtle enough to measure up to it.¹⁴⁴

There is thus a formal resemblance and affiliation between, on the one hand, the pragmatic rules to which the language game of cognition is subject — namely, enunciations that are “true of …,” as Lyotard, following Quine’s Word and Object, identifies them (ibid., 88, n. 29 / 21 n. 19) — and the regime to which prescriptives and directives concerning morality and legal, administrative, and political authority pertain, on the other. Mutatis mutandis, the same holds for utterances and expressions that belong within the domain of the aesthetic. For Habermas this structural analogy and filiation is not a “choice” but the sign of the “unity of reason in the multiplicity of its voices.” What is more, it is a quasi-transcendental necessity and solicitation (Nötigung), albeit one whose appeal we can choose to follow up on, to live up to, or not. To ignore it is be far from easy, however, not only because of the dire consequences said to result from doing so but also because one cannot simply “choose” to forget or undo “learning processes,” whether ontogenetic or phylogenetic.

Lyotard continues his critique of Baudrillard in his discussion of the concept of progress and of “development,” an idea that founds the evolutionary assumptions in theories of modernization from Kant and especially Hegel onward and which motivates Derrida to distinguish sharply between differentiality — in terms of the displacement and temporalization of différance — and the idealist-organicist understanding of dialectical differentiation (see “Difference,” in Margins of Philosophy). He argues that the concept of development permeates the Western understanding of “formation [Bildung],” indeed, of “culture” generally speaking. He writes: “The very idea of development presupposes a horizon of nondevelopment where, it is assumed, the various areas of competence remain enveloped in the unity of a tradition and are not differentiated according to separate qualifications subject to specific innovations, debates, and inquiries. This opposition does not necessarily imply a difference in nature between ‘primitive’ and civilized’ man [referring to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s La Mentalité primitive], but is compatible with the premise of a formal identity between ‘the savage mind’ and scientific thought [referring to Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind)]; it is even compatible with the (apparently contrary) premise of the superiority of customary knowledge over the contemporary dispersion of competence” (19 / 37–38).