1. What is at stake in shifting the project of immanent critique (and the critical theory tradition) from the historically more prominent frame of society to the frame of the self?
Some of us thought that there was behind this an idea that political and ethical transformation takes place on the site of the self, rather than the site of ‘society’ or ‘culture’. There was, however, a worry that this makes the project too micro- and particular, because it is not clear that we can get to broad-scale political transformation if we focus on the self. Others of us thought that there was behind this an idea that to address the politics of distribution and the politics of recognition we need to resituate politics itself around the self, and perhaps also the self construed in terms of experience. There was, however, a worry that experience is too philosophically loaded a concept to be workable here.
2. What is at stake in “integrating” (p. 7) Foucaultian genealogy and Habermasian critical theory? How are these two being brought together? And why?
We discussed the potential utility (or lack thereof) of other metaphors for relating these two traditions. Why not “delegate”? What, in other words, is “integration”? How does integration work as a theoretical project? As an interpretive project? How does it work as a historically emergent phenomenon? How should we understand this term? How does this term help us make sense of this general philosophical interpretive strategy: “Some modifications in each of these perspectives will be necessary…” (p. 8)? On what register does integration occur? Is it at the level of base philosophical assumptions or commitments?
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