Asher Horowitz

‘By a hair’s breadth’ Critique, transcendence and the ethical in Adorno and Levinas

The article stages the beginning of a virtual conversation between Levinas’s ‘ethics as first philosophy’ and Adorno’s negative dialectic. Part I frames the problem: for both thinkers the task of critique depends on some access to a ‘fixed point’ for transcendence (Levinas) or a ‘standpoint removed’ from the domain of existence (Adorno). Part II traces the deep, even essential, connection both perceive between knowledge and violence, a link which brings the possibility of critique even more stringently into question. A standpoint removed must be both less and more than knowledge. Part III sketches Adorno’s response to this dilemma in the tracing of a negative dialectic, a thinking that is ‘the morality of thought’, and one that turns traditional dialectics inside-out. Negative dialectic seems to meet Levinas’s ethical criteria for critique. Part IV outlines Levinas’s response: the fixed point for critique is in the proximity and sensibility of the ethical relation that lies behind all formal alterity and therefore behind all ontology and all cognition, whether pre-dialectical, dialectical, or post-dialectical. Yet the ethical relation cannot be said except in terms virtually dependent on negative dialectic. Part V examines a potential Levinasian criticism of Adorno and a potential Adornian criticism of Levinas. The fulfillment of the ambition of each would require him to adopt the standpoint of the other. And this may be possible in that thinking along with each demands that one think not only of multiple perspectives but with them.

Narcissism of the Minor Differences: What Is at Issue and What Is at Stake in the Civic Humanism Question

Debate about the nature and vitality of a civic humanist tradition in America long featured an argument between adherents of Louis Hartzs thesis of the United States as the worlds most liberal nation and J. G. A. Pococks claim that the eighteenth-century American political culture involved a transformation of the European civic republican tradition. More recently, scholars have converged on a pluralistic account stressing the mutual interactions of several paradigms in the early Republic. Yet questions can be raised not only about the functioning of the linguistic paradigms that underlie much of the argument, but also about the meaning of civic republican language in its U.S. usage and context. A reexamination of Hartzs work and of the largely ignored comparative dimension of Pococks approach yields a surprising degree of agreement between the two on the existence of a liberal civilization in the early United States and the importance of the weakness of non-liberal streams of thought in forming American political culture. This consensus suggests that the communitarian effort to revive civic republicanism is unlikely to succeed because it fails to sustain the notion of critical difference between a community of democratic individuals and capitalist development.