Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jurgen Habermas' Critical Theory
Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jurgen Habermas' Critical Theory

Author: Kenneth MacKendrick

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-03-25

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 1135913161

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This book argues that Jürgen Habermas’ critical theory can be productively developed by incorporating a wider understanding of fantasy and imagination as part of its conception of communicative rationality and communicative pathologies. Given that meaning is generated both linguistically and performatively, MacKendrick argues that desire and fantasy must be taken into consideration as constitutive aspects of intersubjective relations. His aim is to show that Habermasian social theory might plausibly renew its increasingly severed ties with the early critical theory of the Frankfurt School by taking account of these features of practice life, thus simultaneously rekindling the relevance of the nearly forgotten emancipatory intent in his earlier work and rejuvenating an emphasis on the contemporary critique of reason. This innovative new study will be of interest to those focusing on the early writings of Habermas, the writings of the Frankfurt School, and the relation between critical theory, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis.

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Author: Angela Carter

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1986-03-04

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0140235191

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The transformation of Desiderio's city into a mysterious kingdom is instantaneous: Hallucination flows with magical speed in every brain; avenues and plazas are suddenly as fertile as fairy-book forests. And the evil comes, too, as imaginary massacres fill the streets with blood, the dead return to question the living, and profound anxiety drives hundreds to suicide. Behind it all stands Doctor Hoffman, whose gigantic generators crack the immutable surfaces of time and space and plunge civilization into a world without the chains – or structures – of reason. Only Desiderio, immune to mirages and fantasy, can defeat him. But Desiderio's battle will take him to the very brink of undeniable, irresistible desire.

The Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas
The Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas

Author: Uwe Steinhoff

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2009-06-18

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0191569992

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Jürgen Habermas seeks to defend the Enlightenment and with it an ëmphatical", üncurtailed ̈conception of reason against the post-modern critique of reason on the one hand, and against so-called scientism (which would include critical rationalism and the greater part of analytical philosophy) on the other. His objection to the former is that it is self-contradictory and politically defeatist; his objection to the latter is that, thanks to a standard of rationality derived from the natural sciences or from Weber's concept of purposive rationality, it leaves normative questions to irrational decisions. Habermas wants to offer an alternative, trying to develop a theory of communicative action that can clarify the normative foundations of a critical theory of society as well as provide a fruitful theoretical framework for empirical social research. This study is a comprehensive and detailed analysis and sustained critique of Habermas' philosophical system since his pragmatist turn in the seventies. It clearly and precisely depicts Habermas' long chain of arguments leading from an analysis of speech acts to a discourse theory of law and the democratic constitutional state. Along the way the study examines, among other things, Habermas' theory of communicative action, transcendental and universal pragmatics and the argument from "performative contradictions", discourse ethics, the consensus theory of truth, Habermas' ideas on developmental psychology, communicative pathologies and social evolution, his theory of social order, the analysis of the tensions between system and lifeworld, his theory of modernity, and his theory of deliberative democracy. For all Habermas students this study will prove indispensable.

Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany
Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany

Author: Sonja Boos

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2015-03-10

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 080147194X

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Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany is an interdisciplinary study of a diverse set of public speeches given by major literary and cultural figures in the 1950s and 1960s. Through close readings of canonical speeches by Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Ingeborg Bachmann, Martin Buber, Paul Celan, Uwe Johnson, Peter Szondi, and Peter Weiss, Sonja Boos demonstrates that these speakers both facilitated and subverted the construction of a public discourse about the Holocaust in postwar West Germany. The author's analysis of original audio recordings of the speech events (several of which will be available on a companion website) improves our understanding of the spoken, performative dimension of public speeches.While emphasizing the social constructedness of discourse, experience, and identity, Boos does not neglect the pragmatic conditions of aesthetic and intellectual production—most notably, the felt need to respond to the breach in tradition caused by the Holocaust. The book thereby illuminates the process by which a set of writers and intellectuals, instead of trying to mend what they perceived as a radical break in historical continuity or corroborating the myth of a "new beginning," searched for ways to make this historical rupture rhetorically and semantically discernible and literally audible.

Organized Networks
Organized Networks

Author: Ned Rossiter

Publisher: Nai010 Publishers

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13:

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"The celebration of network cultures as open, decentralized, and horizontal all too easily overshadows their political dimensions. Organized Networks sets out to destroy these myths by tracking the antagonisms that lurk within Internet governance debates, the exploitation of labor in creative industries, and the aesthetics of global finance capital. Cutting across the fields of media theory, political philosophy and cultural critique, Ned Rossiter diagnoses some of the key problematics facing network cultures today."--BOOK JACKET.

Expanding Curriculum Theory
Expanding Curriculum Theory

Author: William M. Reynolds

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-28

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 113470450X

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Expanding Curriculum Theory, Second Edition carries through the major focus of the original volume—to reflect on the influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of "lines of flight" and its application to curriculum theorizing. What is different is that the lines of flight have since shifted and produced expanded understandings of this concept for curriculum theory and for education in general. This edition reflects the impact of events that have contributed to this shift, in particular the (il)logic of school policy changes and reforms in the past decade, and the continued explosion of social media and its effect on the collective understanding of how both "knowledge" and "education" work as forms of repression. The introduction updates the text and puts it into current debates in the field and in the larger socio-economic milieu. New dis/positions are presented that explore central questions circulating within and outside curriculum studies. Exciting scholarship on a range of topics includes notions of desire and commodities, youth culture and violence, new directions in curriculum theory, Eco-Ethical consciousness, new Deleuzian views of normality, the diffusion of technology and lines of flight in transnational curriculum inquiry.

Current of Music
Current of Music

Author: Theodor W. Adorno

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-10-16

Total Pages: 696

ISBN-13: 0745694632

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Fleeing the Nazis, Theodor W. Adorno lived in New York City as a refugee from 1938 until 1941. During these years, he was intensively involved in a study of how the recently developed techniques for the nation-wide transmission of music over radio were transforming the perception of music itself. This broad ranging radio research was conceived as nothing less than an investigation, partly empirical, of Walter Benjamin's speculative claims for the emancipatory potential of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction. The results of Adorno's project set him decisively at odds with Benjamin's theses and at the same time became the body of thinking that formed the basis for Adornos own aesthetics in his Philosophy of New Music. Current of Music is the title that Adorno himself gave to this research project. For complex reasons, however, Adorno was not able to bring the several thousands of pages of this massive study, most of it written in English, to a final form prior to leaving New York for California, where he would immediately begin work with Max Horkheimer on the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Robert Hullot-Kentor, the distinguished Adorno scholar, reconstructed Adorno's project for the Adorno Archive in Germany and provides a lengthy and informative introduction to the fragmentary texts collected in this volume. Current of Music will be widely discussed for the light it throws on the development of Adorno's thought, on his complex relationship with Walter Benjamin, but most of all for the important perspectives it provides on questions of popular culture, the music of industrial entertainment, the history of radio and the social dimensions of the reproduction of art.

From Bakunin to Lacan
From Bakunin to Lacan

Author: Saul Newman

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9780739102404

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In its comparison of anarchist and poststructuralist thought, From Bakunin to Lacan contends that the most pressing political problem we face today is the proliferation and intensification of power. Saul Newman targets the tendency of radical political theories and movements to reaffirm power and authority, in different guises, in their very attempt to overcome it. In his examination of thinkers such as Bakunin, Lacan, Stirner, and Foucault Newman explores important epistemological, ontological, and political questions: Is the essential human subject the point of departure from which power and authority can be opposed? Or, is the humanist subject itself a site of domination that must be unmasked? As it deftly charts this debate's paths of emergence in political thought, the book illustrates how the question of essential identities defines and re-defines the limits and possibilities of radical politics today.

Adorno and Heidegger
Adorno and Heidegger

Author: Iain Macdonald

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780804756358

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This collection of essays explores the conflictual history and future implications of two important traditions of twentieth-century European thought: the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno and the ontology of Martin Heidegger.

Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea
Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea

Author: Hyaeweol Choi

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2009-11-15

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0520098692

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“Pathbreaking. Approaches the transcultural and religious encounters of Korean and American women with a remarkable degree of sensitivity and nuance, as well as with judicious use of feminist and postcolonial theory. Its rich and diverse historical examples and illustrations are both engaging to read and meticulously documented.”—Namhee Lee, UCLA