Jurgen Habermas, Rainer Forst, Nicole Deitelhoff, and Klaus Gunther signed on 16 November 2023, ‘Principles of Solidarity: A Statement’,[1] in which they clarified that the role of critical theory today was to be clear on not attributing genocidal intentions to Isreal’s actions against the Palestinian people, who are referred to in the statement as ‘the Palestinian Population’. According to this statement, the primary concern of the representatives of the Frankfurt School today is to refine ‘the standards of judgement’ and defend the ethos of the Federal Republic of Germany that is based on the obligation to ‘respect human dignity’ and protect primarily Jewish life and Isreal’s unquestionable right to exist as a Jewish state. There is no other mention of the Palestinian people in the statement, the sole and primary task of critical theory today, according to its signatories is to fend off the return of antisemitism. They single out 7 October as an event that has no historical narrative of its own beyond that of German politics of memorialisation and reconciliation – as though 7 October was an attack against Germany and Europe, and not against an ongoing colonial occupation. The signatories also effectively equivocate antisemitism with anti-Zionism. This issue is not the focus of my essay here, I can point the reader to numerous recent critical engagements such as Historical Materialism’s special issues on the topic. Rather, I am concerned with the claim that the task of critical theory is to point out the ‘standards of judgement’. This cannot be farther from Marx’s critical contribution to the analysis of modern society and its contradictions. Critical theory must not be allowed to descend into the task of safeguarding the normative liberal order and the defence of a fictive public sphere bereft of ideologies, for this definition of the task of critical theory is one step away from bourgeois moral philosophy.
Amy Allen has developed a critique of the normative turn in critical theory; however, this critique is inadequate, it asks the right question but offers the wrong answers. In her attempt at decolonising critical theory, Allen proposes bringing together Foucault and Habermas to attune critical theory to the mechanisms of power implicit in the propagation of a teleological belief in progress. The normative turn, according to Allen, can benefit from Foucault’s historicism or his historical a priori: in the end, decolonising critical theory implies opening it up to postcolonial theory. This is, in fact, a direction being actively pursued today by the Frankfurt School through re-using old and tried sociologies of knowledge as an entry way. Nobody seems to read any longer Adorno’s decimating critique of Mannheim.[2]
I want to turn attention here to one specific signatory of the letter of solidarity, Rainer Forst, in whose work on theories of justification we can clearly see this unstated union between Habermas and Foucault. The motivation is to understand the theoretical and ideological grounds for the apologetic stance of critical theorists today, and to argue that a proper decolonisation of theory would have to overcome its cynical instrumentalisation of normativity. How is it justifiable to claim that one people’s suffering outweighs the suffering of others?
Habermas-Foucault: an unholy alliance
What unites Habermas and Foucault today is the mutual disavowal of both Marx’s critique of capitalism and Freud’s account of the unconscious, despite the fact that it was these two fields of theory that originally provided the ground for critical theory. Not only has critical theory, under the influence of what I am calling the Habermas-Foucault alliance, moved away from developing a dialectical account of social forms, of the mediation of both forms of subjectivity and objectivity, but it now also projects its own image of critical theory bereft of Marx unto the rest of the world. This disavowal of Marx proceeds to decolonise critical theory by expanding its account of normativity to accommodate other non-European critical traditions. However, these ‘other’ traditions that are deemed befitting for the mould of contemporary critical theory, are tolerated only insofar as they also disavow what Western critical theory itself disavows: it is a double disavowal.
- critical theoretical formulations outside Europe have suffered a historical failure because they could not deal through a Eurocentric Marxian framework with the central problems of identity/culture in their respective societies, for which the liberal democratic framing is the only horizon. The debates on normativity are the answer to this problem. Here, Marxism is Eurocentric, whereas an expanded neo-idealism and neo-Kantian liberalism that reaffirms the validity of culture is not.
- Translating non-European critical theory back into critical theory means re-aligning it with the disavowal of Marx in Western critical theory. This ranges from all kinds of historicisations of failures, left-wing melancholia, to the tolerations of liberal versions of Islam and so on. The only ‘critical theories’ worthy of the name are those that can be tolerated[3] and adjudicated within the normative frameworks of contemporary liberal critical theories. These “other” fields of critique are only incorporated based on the projection of the discourses of a contemporary Western critical theory that is bereft of Marx. These frameworks encompass, but are not limited to, questions around normativity, recognition, communicative rationality, melancholic attachments, and theories of mourning. Everything else is dismissed as a traditional Marxism that maintains an outdated account of class struggle and anticolonial struggle. Hence, we see endless proliferations of books on left-wing melancholias, uninterrupted mourning, landscapes of affect stuck in an eternal present of struggles for recognition and ethical self-fashioning and so on. As a counter to this double disavowal, I want to argue that the real decolonisation of critical theory lies in the urgent and necessary critique of the current holy alliance of Foucault and Habermas in the field. To decolonise critical theory means to expose to expose this masquerade of critique as uncritical theory.
By moving away from providing an understanding of the intertwinement between the logic of capital and its uneven historical dynamic, what critical theory has in fact done today is project the “empty homogenous time” of capital whose ideology is liberalism as the only future for everyone else. Whether progress is finished or unfinished, or whether liberalism is over and fascism imminent, seems to make no concrete difference for understanding the actuality of ongoing struggles for justice around the world. The question that needs to be posed, especially by critical theorists from the global south, is how has critical theory today become the representative of liberal state ideology? Granted that there is a stark difference between the position of critical theorists; yet there is also a defining commonality, it reduces any political struggle into a deliberation about the expansion of normative frameworks. In the absence of an account of the injustices that structure capitalist sociality, any present struggles for justice, the axiomatic of any political procedure,[4] are depoliticised, reduced to moral and normative claims pertaining to forms of life.
Both Habermas and Foucault develop an account of politics that is both consensual and grounded in the normative as a field of justifications.[5] Politics, in the wake of Habermas and Foucault, can only be thought as a reconciliation of morality and ethics. Procedural claims for Habermas and valuable ways of life for Foucault are differences in kind within the general normative project of modernity. Despite the appearance of antagonism, for instance, Habermasians and Foucauldians today share a fundamental commitment: since there is no longer a horizon of social revolution and all resistance is co-opted and merely a Janus face of what it opposes, then the institutions of capitalist liberal democracy provide the unsurpassable horizon for political contestation.
What I am calling the Foucault-Habermas alliance in critical theory today has three features:
- it lacks a theory of mediation and cannot account for how social forms of capitalism mediate different kinds of domination in relation to a structure of exploitation.
- it ontologises power: either as noumenal power or as constitutive of the human condition, more crucially, in this account, there are no subjects outside of power relations.
- it cannot account for subjective violence in relation to systemic and objective forms of violence and thereby resorts to legalistic and moralistic formulations to fend of the critical task of thinking violence. Critical theory, after Foucault and Habermas, disavows its own complicity in legitimating the liberal democratic states hold on legitimate violence by projecting a split account of violence onto others. This leads to acceptable violence, a good violence, (one that can be justified ethically and normatively) and a bad violence (one that must be condemned).
- it has an inability to think through mass politics beyond reducing them to anachronistic populisms or fetishisations of identity.
Under what I am calling the Foucault-Habermas (FH) alliance, communicative rationality has come to be supplemented by a Foucauldian account of the pathologies of power. This theoretical alliance purports that domination is only discursively resolved through the institutions of capitalist liberalism. Violence is at the core of systems of justification and legality, we cannot disavow it, and avowing it entails a commitment to turning critique into the task of distinguishing between violence and non-violence, a violence that can be justified and a non-violence that is justifiable.
Foucault’s critique of power re-ontologises power because it cannot explain the difference between concrete and abstract domination, power is generative and enabling (if we think here of his distinction between puissance and pouvoir), and the aim of critique lies in releasing puissance (force) to resist pouvoir. Although Habermas’s account of authority is not metaphysical, it also avows its coercive uses: reason and coercion come hand in hand. We can recall here Mladen Dolar’s formulation: “violence is always discursively framed, prepared by persuasion, justified by discourse, legitimized by all kinds of arguments – there is no violence without the word that supports it. The long history of wars, ethnic cleansings, pogroms, and massacres massively testifies to the fact that all this was thoroughly prepared and constantly underpinned by argument and persuasion.”[6]
It is not reductive to say that there is no critical theory without Marx’s incorporation of both critique (first signified by Kant’s account of transcendental subject, the Copernican philosophical revolution) and dialectical theory (born from the medieval dialectics and consummated in Hegel). More crucially, however, Marx overcomes both Kant and Hegel by showing that critical consciousness is itself determined by the social forms of modern capitalist society, by the form of value or the form of commodities. Critique is conditioned by social forms but not entirely reduced to them. A critique that is blind to an account of social forms, is blind to the blind spot of its origin, it becomes reduced to reproducing the Kantian transcendental empirical doublet as a defence of bourgeois state institutions.
Rainer Forst’s theory of justification synchronises a neo-Kantian and neo-idealist analysis that has culminated in an undeclared synthesis of Habermas and Foucault. As we all know, the debate between Habermas and Foucault never really happened, perhaps precisely because they would have had more to agree on than not.[7] In Forst’s work, following Habermas and Foucault, rationality and power are indissociable: the scepticism about progress aligns itself with the unstoppable progress of capitalist modernity.[8] Communicative rationality is supplemented by a Foucauldian account of the pathologies of power. This theoretical synthesis purports that domination is only discursively resolved through the institutions of capitalist liberalism. But it is this very distinction between authority and power that ought to distinguish Kantianism from Nietzscheanism, which denies it. The internalisation of power cum authority, in Allen’s conflation, constitutes a self that is capable of rationalising, of judging, of making distinctions, and of being disciplined. Subjectivity is here moulded by a primary scene of repression—although here we must note that Habermas rejects the Freudian account of repression—through which we become capable to feel obligated by reasons and motivated by them. In Allen’s account, the normative is a space of reasons organized by authority, which in turn authorizes reason. Foucault’s “moral scepticism” becomes a welcome partner to Habermas’s universal normative commitments. Allen makes a strong point about the cross-contamination between validity and power: a matter she suggests is inescapable, and that Foucault is necessary for understanding, given that we are in a world in which Western moral and political ideals of freedom and democracy continue to be so closely associated with the morally bankrupt projects of colonialism and empire. Rainer Forst’s theory of justification is closer to this position than Habermas.
Habermas’s statement “A Principle of Solidarity”[9] with Israel issued earlier this year is a demonstration of this complicity. It is important to note here that, historically, Foucauldians did not necessarily have a more salutary position on the anticolonial struggle in Palestine, even though they claim to be more attuned to mechanisms of power.[10] In fact, we could say that Foucault until the very end was very suspicious of ‘recent liberation movements’ that ‘suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics.’[11]
Rainer Forst is more generous towards Foucault in his work than Habermas has been. The normative in Forst’s theory of justice can only be thought by avowing what he calls the noumenal nature of power: power is both thinkable and corruptible. It turns into violence only when it fails to assert its authority.
Power should be understood in processual terms as the ability to determine, or if necessary even to close off (or also to open up), the space of reasons for others, whether based on a good argument, an ideological justification, or a threat. Social power does not have its “seat” in certain means, institutions, or structures, but instead in the noumenal space in which struggles over hegemony take place. Thus, the concept of power is neither positively nor negatively charged, but is instead neutral; only its modes of exercise, ranging from “empowerment” to domination and oppression, whether interpersonal or structural, must be differentiated and evaluated. Power is always “discursive” in nature, therefore, but it is not always “communicative” in Habermas’s sense or exclusively part of subject-constituting, disciplining “epistemes,” as Foucault argues. This shows once again the advantages of varying our use of the concept of justification between descriptive and normative understandings. Oftentimes social power can be explained only by reconstructing the justification narratives that shape and in part constitute a normative order.[12]
For Forst, the task of critical theory is not to provide a dialectical account of power that grounds it in the social forms of capital, because power is simply not anchored in any such institutions and rather maintains a noumenal or ‘intellectual’ status.[13] The discursivity of power lies in it not being reducible to neither the rational, pace Habermas, or the disciplinary epistemes, pace Foucault, but to genealogy. “There is no realm of “reason” beyond “power,” therefore, but there are better and worse, reasonable and unreasonable, justifications besides more and less effective ones. So, we have to distinguish the normative force of justifications and justification narratives from their quality.”[14] We can take this to mean that there is a force in different qualities: persuasive, coercive, violent. This is a point that Habermas and Foucault would converge on, although Foucault is interested in the ‘coercive effects’ of discourse while Habermas looks at more ‘material constraints’ on communication (the state, the market) there is no substantive disagreement on the difference in forces exerted on and by discourse. Forst continues,
Freedom and power belong together, as long as the latter acts upon cognitively motivated subjects. Power is the art of binding others through reasons; it is at the core of normativity. The spectrum of relations of power, therefore, extends from conditions based on freely shared, reciprocally general reasons at the one end, to those situated in the transitional zone where power is replaced by violence at the other. It should be noted in this context that power also exists where cognitive effects are achieved through lies or deception.[15]
‘Cognitively motivated subjects’ may imply here non-cognitively motivated subjects, perhaps affectively motivated, or motivated by pathological interests of reason. Although Habermas was more interested in taking stock of the pathologies of reason by shifting focus to justification and not communication, Forst deflects the problem while claiming to resolve it. In Forst’s rendering, the force of justification is the same, however it is motivated, its normative power is the same: “Justification narratives develop normative power to the extent that they cast the political and social world in a certain light, connect the past, present, and future, reality and ideals, as well as individuals and a collective, and form them into an accepted order of justification.”[16]
Justification itself, in Forst’s account, gains a mediating power, it becomes a form of mediation. This renders all justification as being always-already ideological. How justification is a social form in capitalist society remains to be verified, a society which is premised on a foundational injustice that constitutes and permeates all social life. Marx’s fundamental argument against liberals and social democrats of his time was that we cannot posit a moral critique of normative foundations of a social system because morality is largely determined by material conditions, capitalism is both a culture and an ecology, these must be transformed for any alignment of ethics and politics to become possible.[17]
Once justification is grounded in a ‘collective perception of its cogency’ which, regardless of its form, maintains its force, then it functions as ideology would because it is purely formal regardless of content. However, neither Habermas nor Foucault have a theory of ideology, indeed their alliance, in Forst’s work, turns ideology into power. Foucault leaves no outside to power, there is no escape from power, we practise governmentality and self-care as an inversion of power. There is no outside to power, no way to escape the logic of representation.[18] In Forst’s account, justification is always already contaminated with power, it cannot escape it. Given that power cannot be undone, the task of critical theory becomes the development of a theory of justice whereby justice becomes a new regulative principle that limits power from unleashing its noumenal fangs.
Critical theory must do this because, according to Forst, Marx ultimately lacks a political theory. Forst maintains that Marx’s concept of exploitation is a moral one lacking a political theory, ‘“Exploitation” is clearly a moral concept that expresses the violation of personal autonomy and of the dignity of counting as an equal.’[19] We should pause here and rethink this assertion: exploitation, for Marx, is the extraction of surplus from necessary labour. There is a theft of time, the essence of human life, from wage labour which is, in turn, invisible to bourgeois law, this is the true meaning of Marx’s claim “freedom, equality, property and Bentham.”[20] Free wage-labour is, after all, not discernible in bourgeois law as illegal force. The injustice in exploitation is the theft of time, the time of life, a theft that is not registered as such and it is not merely an insult to dignity.
Forst argues that Marx’s theory of alienation, and its overcoming, entails a deficit in political concepts, because the overcoming of alienation leads to a utopia of unmediated transparent means of organisation of collective autonomy. He asks: Who will then (in postcapitalism) decide on behalf of the collective? So, he reads Marx’s dialectic of freedom and necessity as entailing an apolitical overcoming of alienation, because it is an overcoming that is economic and not political.
The question of justice as the recovery a form of political autonomy over economic relations was not part of the Marxian program—before the great turn this is not possible, after it not necessary. Thus, his notion of overcoming alienation is essentially apolitical: a form of unmediated sociality based on trust in historical necessity and belief in iron economic laws.[21]
But how can the bourgeois distinction between politics and economics even be squared with a Marxian critical theory? Are not these in themselves forms of reified knowledge. Forst, like other contemporary critics, does not really care for this question, because the normative is prior to the social non-relation imposed by capital and is prior also in postcapitalist society. The reason for this is that Forst collapses domination and exploitation in one move, disregarding the fact that capitalism is a global system of abstract domination which extracts surplus, socially necessary labour time from necessary labour. No matter how long you work, the value you produce is greater than the value of your labour power. This is not a moral critique, it is a critique of a regime of time. Domination by value requires exploitation, which requires the time of life. Life is, in turn, subordinated to the production of empty time, surplus value. This is an ontological critique and not simply a moral one.
Can we not clearly see this theft of the time of life in colonised societies? Colonisation is at the heart of capitalist original accumulation. Today, for instance, and as we write, Isreal, a colonial state, continues its onslaught justified by theorists of justification and based on land annexation, transfer, incarceration, armed with genocidal intent. In the presence of such a declaredly ethno-nationalist state, Palestinians are obstructed, to quote from Forst despite his blindness to this form of injustice, from ‘breaking open orders of justification’ through deliberation and communication: they are excluded from the public sphere, silenced, vilified as human animals, surveilled and policed.
Although Forst claims that ‘genuine progress, a concept that critical theory cannot dispense with, occurs where new levels of justification are made accessible or are achieved through struggles that make subjects into justificatory authorities in the first place’,[22] this right to justification is not granted to the Palestinian people, who are tellingly called a ‘population’ in the statement. Why is this case? Why does a critical theory of justice exclude a struggle against historical and ongoing injustice? Is it because Palestinians, by choosing armed resistance, forfeit their right to justification understood as a communicative strategy? Or is it because the Palestinians succumb to more easily than others to the noumenal fangs of power, which critical theorists like Forst work hard to repress, keep at bay? Does the explosion of genocidal violence only serve to remind critical theorists of the conceptual point of keeping power at bay? Is it, perhaps, because Palestinians are not cognitively motivated subjects?
To go back to the earlier point regarding social forms and Marx. The disentanglement of structures of justification from ‘ideas of recipients and goods’, Forst’s stated aim, cuts of critique off from an account of social forms in capital. More crucially, it blocks critical theory from developing an understanding of the colonial relation as original capitalist accumulation in the present, and not in terms of concluded struggles from the past to be adjudicated by the resort to human rights discourses.[23] Forst is explicit about this disentanglement, or what we could call a double abstraction of justice. The focus on the concept of justice as ‘an autonomous collective process, a structure of justification’ is to detach justice from ‘ideas of recipients and goods’.[24]
An autonomous collective process of producing social and political conditions that are not only susceptible of justification in reciprocal and general terms but can themselves be established via justification and aim to realize a basic structure of justification. Thus, the question of power, qua social and political power that shapes collective processes, is central to justice. Reified, unpolitical conceptions of justice, by contrast, detach justice from political autonomy in accordance with ideas of recipients and goods, resulting in deficient conceptions of justice.[25]
In Forst’s democratisation of justice, his spreading it out into a collective process of adjudication, Marx, the very thinker of collectivity, now appears to have a reified account of justice. People do not only care about goods and services, they care for justifications that they can accept and make acceptable to others. But, here, we must ask: by what criteria do we then judge reified unpolitical conceptions of justice? What is the ‘regulative principle’ to which we can resort, if justification is always tainted by power, contaminated by the noumena? And, if critical theory abandons any account of reification (which is grounded in the real abstractions of social forms), how do we discern un-reified concepts from reified ones? In this instance, the Palestinian resistance to injustice has to be seen as premised on an a priori assessment of it as a version of Muslim militancy having a deficient concept of justice. A Foucauldian may not be able to make such a claim, but a Habermasian would. But, if we accept Forst’s account of power here, how is Israeli power really different from Palestinian power in this context? Or is the adjudication simply that Palestinians have no legitimate order of justification, are emotive, and hence irrational actors? Why does normative neutrality buckle here in this instance in particular?
Forst’s gesture to reified concepts of justice here is only a window dressing, because his resort to noumenal power renders the discussion of ideology and its relation to domination and exploitation obsolete. Characteristic of contemporary critical theory, Forst has no theory of mediation to account for reification. The purpose of his engagement is to insist that humans are autonomous agents able to adjudicate norms following the Habermasian dictum: a people cannot be governed except by rules and laws which they accept for themselves and make acceptable to others through deliberation. This ability to self-legislate or justify norms ought to be exercised against all constraints and violence emerges only when there is a cut in discourse, an “inappropriate discursive arena” in which there is a lack of justification for norms (discursive and institutional).[26] It is only there, Forst argues, that the outbreak of violence causes a weakening of power, albeit asserting it. Sheer force is a sign of power breaking down because real power is one that ‘rests on recognition’,[27] with the caveat that recognition is not always reasoned, you can recognise the force of a gun for instance.
The exercise and effects of power are based on the recognition of a reason—or better, and more often, of various reasons—to act differently than one would have acted without that reason. This recognition rests on seeing a “good enough” reason to act; it means that you see a justification for changing how you were going to act. Power rests on recognized, accepted justifications—some good, some bad, some in between. A threat (or a gun) can be seen as such a justification, as can a good argument. But power exists only when there is such acceptance.[28]
In light of Forst’s stated solidarity with Isreal and not Palestine, with a coloniser and not colonised subject, how do we make sense of such statements? How is it that this position then legitimates the Israeli resort to violence but not the Palestinian right to resistance? This ‘realism of power’ is premised on not recognising the Palestinian as an agent of justification. Palestinian resistance to the sheer force of power cannot be seen as a claim for justification or a demand for recognition even: they are simply sealed off from the ‘space of reasons’ altogether. They have no right to an ‘equal standing as normative authorities with the space of a [normative] order’.[29] This is indeed quite perplexing because Forst opens up the normative to the processes of power as an attempt of inclusion of all rational agents, or cognitively motivated agents. Cognitively motivated is also expanded to include what he calls ‘narratives of justification’. What is then the reason of the blind spot on Palestine?
Moreover, violence in Forst’s analysis appears as subjective instance against an objective deadlock understood as a lack of justificatory procedures: when the other does not understand my justifications, I have a right to enforce them. ‘Noumenal power’ becomes ‘sheer physical force’.[30] That said, this exhibition of force as brute repressive and acting on individuals is already, according to Forst here, a sure sign of the breakdown of power. Power is unknowable, some people are weak, others are not, rarely are there true ‘Leviathans able to wield power’,[31] a statement that sounds more like a desire for a wish-fulfilment than a lament. This position is akin to Foucault’s conclusion in his own work: power cannot be overcome, we can never do away with power. For Foucault, the answer lies in practices of self-care and governmentality, in the ethics of the self, the refashioning of the self and so on, whereas, for Forst, the answer lies in developing a ‘critical theory of relations of justification’. This theory of justification is primarily tasked with establishing the limit of power: power is noumenal but can only be held back by a theory of justice. The premise for this theory of justice is to ‘establish a basic structure of justification among free and equal persons as the first demand of justice’.[32] How we get from the ought to the actual, however, is the crux of the matter, and can explain to us how certain forms of power over others can be legitimated by critical theorists of justice.
The Force of Narrative
Narratives figure as central mechanisms in Forst’s account: the historical narratives or stories that people use for justification. Narratives are forms of justification. Although the only regulative principle on debates about progress (which Forst insists is a crucial concept for critical theory) ought to be the concept of justice as a right. A nation for instance, under this framing, can never intervene in a colonial manner into another nation because of the concept of justice (and the capacity of individuals to justify and seek justification) which ensures progress is a self-reflexive, self-determining concept. Forst proceeds to posit ‘social self-determination’ as a field that ought to be regulated by justification adjudicated by free and equal subjects. The human right to justification, he concludes, ought to be an inalienable human right that cannot be questioned. In light of this salutary effort at expanding normative frameworks, what is the conceptual deficit that led Forst (and Habermas) to exclude the Palestinian people from their right to self-determination against colonisation? Why is their thinking halted in this context? Why can they not think the reasons for violence while condemning the violence? How has reason buckled down to the rage of the noumena carried out by a state power? The authority of reason cannot assess the political resort to violence against an occupying power. This is because assessing the legitimacy of the political resort to violence in turn depends on power relations. Critical theory is stuck in the prison house of the noumena: it posits an ideal that constructs society as a reified object but cannot escape its normative framework. The difference between norms and morals, facts and values, cannot be simply adjudicated in forms of consciousness. This works at a level of abstraction that cannot grasp actuality and its misrepresentations on consciousness. Recognizing subjects as actors capable of recognising injustice does not do away with really existing injustices.
This may help us illuminate here the statement signed by Forst and Habermas entitled ‘Principles of Solidarity’. Perhaps the secret of this unconditional solidarity lies in the force of the narrative of justification that accounts for the Israeli nation-state’s own grounds of justification of its onslaught and warof unprecedented proportionson Palestinians. The narrative of justification rests entirely on the singularity of the event of the Holocaust for the German national unification project. The persecution of the Jews is unlike any other persecution, it justifies the aspiration for a religious nation-state, unlike any other. Zionism then becomes the compensation for German Nazism. German critical theory has been made German again, universalism buckles under the weight of German national history: critical theory becomes an apologia for state ideology. Israel, in its current ethnonationalist liberal formation, has a right to exist that is unquestionable because of narrative history that originates from within Germany and Europe, and against the narratives of justification pertaining to Palestinians. The thesis on the singularity of the holocaust fits well into German narrative account of history. Sami Khatib argues that antisemitism has gained a status of singularity in relation to colonialism, racism, fascism, and that it has done so through a specific trajectory that has to do with the internal history of the reunification of Germany.[33] Germany as a nation is unthinkable without Holocaust remembrance. Singularity here creates the effect of a ‘pure present without a past and future’,[34] an end to historical temporality. The Holocaust is a singular crime against humanity unlike any other. This occludes any account of repetition in history, although singularity can repeat with a difference, and the risk of absolutising it leads us to a blindness about the actuality of conditions of injustice in the contemporary world.
Forst’s motivation to amend Foucault’s rejection of an ideal of justice as a regulative principle for social struggle by supplementing it with a deliberative account of justice[35] leads to a strange hybridisation of proceduralism with practices. After Foucault and Habermas, either we have a hysteria of practices, whereby politics are on the side of the governed, the self, or a procedural account of politics that is ‘more sensitive’ to social context and clearly ‘insensitive’ to the injustice experienced by some over others.
We could say that Forst’s genealogical supplement to Habermas’s deliberative sphere, in this instance, is complicit to creating singularity effects. This singularity effect, despite being adjudicated by an expansion of the secular notion of justice, is strangely close to the re-theologisation of the Holocaust, as singularity. Gillian Rose presciently warned of the theologisation of the Holocaust at the hands of liberal politics of representation and remembrance as a refusal to mourn.[36] Rose makes a strong claim for a politics of anxiety that goes beyond the binary of ethics and law, beyond Jerusalem in the place of Athens. She recounts Antigone as an exemplary refusal of the will of the city and its laws, and as a necessary reinvention of the politics of a community. Insisting on mourning rather than remembering atrocity ought to be the law in the political reconstitution of community not the other way around. Rose hence warns that the ‘sacralization, commercialization, and elevation of the Holocaust to a raison d’etat’ for America and Israel[37] as well as for poststructuralism (her critique is particularly directed at Levinas and Derrida) risks turning the ‘representations of fascism’ into the ‘fascism of representation’.[38] She presciently warned of the violence of a fantasy of a ‘political community without boundary walls at which to mourn, one without a soul, with its vulnerable and renegotiable boundaries, to bring to wail at those walls’.[39] Breaking through the walls of an imaginary undead nation, a nation that cannot die, is what acts of refusal, acts of resistance, like those of Antigone’s, and the Palestinians, carry out.
Let us go back to Forst’s claims about the importance of maintaining an account of reflexive normative orders, via an expanded concept of justification. If we were to take Forst’s reading to task and assess, for instance, Antigone’s challenge to Athenian law: her refusal to disclose a motivation for her act and her suspension of the discursive sphere would not be justifiable. Her act is unjustifiable because it does not articulate a justification. Acts of resistance that expose the impotence of normative orders and suspends their discursive structures are pathologised from the perspective of orders of justification. Not only are they pathologized, but the resort to violence against such acts can then be justified as well as a form of power, albeit of lesser authority than deliberation. Forst’s theory of justice reproduces a Kantian transcendental empirical doublet of rule and norm by separating orders of justification into transcendental and empirical ones: sure, practical reason can be divided, but its pathologies must be safeguarded by the noumenal threat of power. This justifies a liberal-democratic order of justification only, which we have to add is today ever-more complicit with fascism. Here, it is important to recall again Gillian Rose’s warning about the proximity of liberal-democratic orders of justification after WWII with fascistic orders of justification.
The monopoly on legitimate forms of violence, whereby the law cannot mourn its own violence, have become critical theory’s main occupation today. This has also become the very raison d’être of the nation-state as a representative of civil society. Rose saw a much more sinister shift in the logic of fascism then the ‘endemic fascism’ analysed by the Frankfurt School as the ‘culture industry’. She poignantly argued that the new fascism in the postmodern era becomes the ‘liberal state’s monopoly over legitimate violence’.[40] Rose’s stronger claim in her work is that postmodernism and poststructuralism, under the influence of Heidegger, reproduce the ideology of the fascism of representation. Ontology, in poststructuralism, becomes a reading of experience as identity, posited against Hegel’s labour of spirit which works against identity, and seeks freedom through spirit’s groundlessness.
This form of theory corresponds to a postmodern risk society composed of individual tax-payers and consumers and not workers, who are, pace Marx, without substance. The new ethos of individual civil rights, including Forst’s ‘right to justice’, does not allow for the structural conditions of inequality to be recognised. Moreover, it is no longer possible to resort to traditional identities anymore, and this, in turn, becomes a source for libertarian fantasies that mask the existing monopoly of the state over violence, as well as masking the ‘the unleashing of the non-legitimate violence of individualized civil society’.[41] We are thereby stuck yet again in the conundrum of law versus ethics, law verses morality, with no access to a politics that would take a risk for the universal good rather than the individual one.
Fascist movements want universal law to apply so that they may have no rivals in their use of non-legitimate violence. They represent the triumph of civil state, the realm of individual need, the war of particular interests. They exploit the already partisan war of particular interests. They exploit the already partisan mediation of the instrumentalized universal—the epitome of what Hegel called ‘the spiritual-animal kingdom.’ This is how it is possible to anticipate the states which combine social libertarianism with political authoritarianism, whether they have traditional class parties or not, could become susceptible to fascist movements.[42]
Rose’s most radical claim was that fascism becomes the law in post-World War II liberal civil societies. This alliance between the representation of fascism and the fascism of representation needs to be countered by a Marxist Hegelianism that refuses the reduction of politics to a moral adjudication based on the power of the will (albeit with its pathologies) or reason to safeguard private individual interest. Here, the argument essentially is that fascism—like philosophies that abolish representation and replace metaphysics with ontology—grants power to all agents equally, within it and outside it, but it transforms the dilemma of power to being one concerning the assertion of moral will and the protection of private interest. As I have argued above, Forst’s immanentism of power, and his extension of Habermas into Foucault, comes dangerously close to this position. Forst can argue here for the universality of justice and propose that freedom from domination ought to be a justifiable universal demand, but his theory of justice will never allow for any determinate negation of injustice. Systems of justification are forever in a process of rebuilding themselves, being open to re-justifications, and legitimations. Justification is thereby reified into liberal democratic forms of deliberation: if colonial situations expose the inner decay of liberalism, they will–according to Forst’s schema—regardless of the cost, eventually fold into the space of reasons of the coloniser.
Clearly, there is more room for ethics than there is for politics today in the project of critique. The Foucauldianisation of critical theory through the ‘accommodation’ of genealogies and narratives is possible through the disavowal of Marx’s account of capital as a structural totality, albeit one that never fully succeeds in totalisation. Foucault’s relationship to Marx is more than strained. His theory of governmentality lends itself to describing what already exists in neoliberalism after the 70s. For Foucault, society does not exist but that is why it must be defended. Consequently, sets of ethical practices are performatively generated and translated into affects and sentiments that make up for the dissociated sociality. But is not dissociated sociality an effect of commodification? The blindness of contemporary critical theorists to how capital, as a system of mediation, co-opts subjectivity, is baffling. There is a form determination at work in the money form and commodity form: these are not simply instruments of domination, or means, they are also direct embodiments of sociality whereby the social stands above and against individual human subjects.
Foucault replaces these form determinations with genealogies of knowledge that must be countered by a remaking of history, albeit through fictions. These genealogies, according to him, are crucial to rationalisation, and the countergenealogies to be constructed, via a process of ‘insubordination’ are to be produced analogously. In other words: the subject is formed by regimes of power-knowledge, and it must seek to re-form itself in relation to the very norms that constitute it. ‘The formation of the subject is the institution of the very reflexivity that indistinguishably assumes the burden of formation. The “indistinguishability” of this line is precisely the juncture where social norms intersect with ethical demands, and where both are produced in the context of a self-making which is never fully self-inaugurated.’[43] The subject becomes the object of self-reflection only for it to emerge as an object: a stylised object of insubordination. The process that underlines the sphere of the normative here (rationalisation, knowledge-power) is copied, mimetically, onto the processes of self-care: there is no escape from power-knowledge nexus, Foucault smuggles back into postfoundationalism and poststructuralism the normative horizon of capitalism, which Habermas surrendered to long ago: all struggles against power are, in turn, only ultimately interested in power.
et us remember here a statement Foucault makes in his debate with Chomsky:
I would like to reply to you in terms of Spinoza and say that the proletariat doesn’t wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time on history, it wants to take power. And because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class, it considers such a war to be just.[44]
Foucault’s analysis renders critique, as a practice of ‘epistemic humility’,[45] supplementing normativity with an open-ness to genealogy, and a recognition of ‘interdependency’ and mutual ‘obligations’ that can be adjudicated beyond the restrictions of the juridic-legal category of individuality or an abstract designation of a collectivity.[46]
Although Forst claims to develop a theory of power that is different from Foucault’s, what he ultimately develops is a ‘discourse-theoretical notion of (non-) domination’ that reduces justice to the ambivalence generated in the interaction between self-justifying individuals and the space of reasons. Because of the ‘noumenal’ nature of power, ‘we cannot know what is in people’s heads’,[47] critical theory then becomes the movement of ambivalence between these two sides:
critique of relations of justification aims at a survey of the various social and political positions of generating and exercising discursive power in different social and political spheres. Normatively speaking, such a critique aims to establish a basic structure of justification among free and equal persons as the first demand of justice, or fundamental justice, as I call it. The question of power is the first question of justice.[48]
Critique becomes the attempt to measure what is essentially out of measure, noumenal. Rather than claim justice as the very axiom of politics, Forst turns justice into a question of power. The danger of this move lies in evacuating critical theory from its most fundamental principle, turning critique into an adjudication of the subjective nature of injustices. The sphere of deliberations and exchange of reasons cannot see the fundamental injustices that are not immediately perceptible to subjects. It is ironic that Forst himself falls prey to this very question, where the injustice suffered by Palestinians at the hand of colonising occupation, is imperceptible in relation to the historical injustice committed against Jews in Europe. Moreover, not only does Forst turn justice into a question of power, but he also vacates justice from any relation to truth. The conclusion of deliberations about justice is, in the end, about the force of reasons and the reasons of force, insofar as we can show how self-reflexive subjects would like to be represented by what system of justification. The ‘parallax’ of justice becomes a liberal void of eternal regress into the discourse of individual rights, individuals who matter and those who do not.
[1] https://k-larevue.com/en/principles-solidarity-statement-habermas/
[2] The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (Adorno et al. [1969] 1976) London: Heinemann Educational Books.
[3] For a critique of liberal tolerance refer to Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion (Princeton, 2006)
[4] Alain Badiou, Metapolitics ( Verso, 2005).
[5] There is a large body of scholarship on the inter-relation between Habermas and Foucault. More recently, there have been strong arguments made regarding the complementarity of their philosophical projects. Amy Allen and Rainer Forst are central figures in developing this complementarity. It can be pointed out here that the Foucault’s anti-foundationalism has been used to expand the Habermasian reduction of politics to communicative rationality or normative foundations. Habermas and Foucault share a mutual disregard for philosophies of the subject. Habermas’s discourse ethics is not subject-centered (in contradistinction to Kant’s moral philosophy) but rather intersubjective and premised on the human ‘ability to think in valid form’, i.e. via argumentation and communication. Foucault’s genealogical approach also declares the death of the subject and yet despite its Nietzschean basis, cannot proceed without pre-supposing the principles of discourse ethics. Cf here Mathew King, Clarifying the Foucault-Habermas Debate (2009).
[6] Mladen Dolar, ‘The Future of Authority’, https://www.e-flux.com/notes/568438/the-future-of-authority
[7] I briefly discuss this in the introduction to Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity Sex and Politics (REF?).
[8] Amy Allen ‘Discourse, Power, and Subjectivation’ in The Philosophical Forum, Volume 40, Issue 1, Spring 2009, pp.1-28. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9191.2008.00314.x
[9] This letter was published on November 13, 2023 by the Normative Orders Center at the Goethe Institute Frankfurt. https://www.normativeorders.net/2023/grundsatze-der-solidaritat/
[10] Note here Foucault’s flirtation with the “nouveaux philosophes” (Bernard-Henri Lévy, Glucksmann et al). Edward Said notes in his article ‘Diary, My Encounter with Sartre’ about his visit to Paris and Foucault not willing to meet with him. In their brief encounter, Foucault recounted to Said his abhorrence of Arabic anti-Semitism in Tunis. Said thought this was the reason for Foucault’s refusal to discuss Middle East Politics with him.? https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n11/edward-said/diary
[11] Foucault, Care of the Self, “On the Genealogy of Ethics”, p.231
[12] Rainer Forst, Normativity and Power, Oxford University Press, 2017, 10.
[13] Forst, Normativity and Power, 64
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid, 63.
[16] Ibid, 64.
[17] Cf William Claire Robert’s Marx’s Inferno for a close reading of Marx’s political theory.
[18] Cf Mladen Dolar ‘Cutting of the King’s Head’ in Lacan Contra Foucault , 37-55.
[19] Forst, Normativity, PAGE?
[20] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm
[21] Forst, Normativity, 130.
[22] Forst, Normativity, 8.
[23] Cf Robert Meister’s seminal critique of the ideology of human rights post 1990, in After Evil REF?.
[24] Forst, Normativity, 8.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid, 50.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid, 43.
[30] Ibid, 41.
[31] Ibid, 51.
[32] Ibid, 149.
[33] Sami Khatib, ‘Against Singularity: Palestine as Symptom and Cause.” https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/against-singularity
[34] Ibid.
[35] Here we can recount the proceduralism of Arendt, Rawls, and Rorty.
[36] Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, 48-52.
[37] Rose, 76
[38] Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p.36
[39] Ibid.
[40] Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, “The representation of fascism and the fascism of representation presupposes the definition of the modern liberal state as the monopoly of means of the legitimate violence,” p. 39 .
[41] Rose, 60
[42] Ibid.
[43] Judith Butler, ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, https://transversal.at/transversal/0806/butler/en
[44] https://chomsky.info/1971xxxx/
[45] Amy Allen, The End of Progress, Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, 76.
[46] Butler, ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, https://transversal.at/transversal/0806/butler/en
[47] Forst, 51
[48] Ibid.
