Lecture 4 - Foucault Habermas debate

Question 1

What is enlightenment? Foucault/Habermas

Answer 1

Habermas: move into public space, therefore debates where everyone is treated equally, public sphere, emancipatory aim, unfinished process
Foucault: mindset, self-actualization, can’t be finished
 Unfinished versus unfinishable

Question 2

Double blackmail

Answer 2

[Double] blackmail (Foucault): separating idea of progress from specific values in era

Question 3

Intensification of power relations

Answer 3

Intensification of power relations: think dome prison, also growth of capabilities

Question 4

Foucault according to Love

Answer 4

Foucault (love): asks us to examine how subjectification limits us and to resist limits. But what can criticize and transgress? What part of us is able to resist? Can language be power free (free of external power, Habermas unforced force)?  Foucault sees no way to separate these things

Question 5

Habermas idea of society

Answer 5

Habermas: does not speak of our values, we need to entrench specific values in our community, rational principles. This makes liberal democracy very fragile, because can be realized only in and through the heads of citizens.

Question 6

Love about Habermas and Foucault:

Answer 6

• Habermas’ approach has something Foucault lacks: communicative rationality, the criterion of conforming to communicatively achieved understandings rather than normatively ascribed agreement.
• Habermas also one sided: he neglects constraints

Question 7

What is discourse F&H

Answer 7

• F: power knowledge regimes mean that truth is always implicated in power, we cannot be outside power relations
• H: discourse is power-free (forceless force of better argument) and constitutes truth through cooperative learning

Question 8

Democracy and institutions F&H

Answer 8

• F: institutions disciplines us, they are contingent results of historical power relations and could be otherwise
• H: democratic institutions are result of procedures of communicative rationality