Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel:
The Irresolvability of the Gadamer-Habermas Debate

WILLIAM J. URBAN

Habermas and the 'All' of Critical Theory

The foregoing sought to specify Gadamer's struggle with the failure of language and reason by placing his thought into the form of the mathematical antinomy. We do the same with Habermas, although the antonymic conflict he faces is of a different modality. That this is possible implies that language and reason fail in a second way – perhaps surprisingly, as we usually assume failure to be singular. But as Lacan says in Seminar XX, 'there are two ways to make the sexual relationship fail... [which] revolve around the fact that there's no such thing as a sexual relationship [il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel]... the male way... [and] the female way. (Lacan 56–7) While the double nature of failure is more evident with the sexuated formulae since the same symbols are used throughout, Kant was aware of this as well. We propose to formulate an antinomy for Habermas immediately in the dynamical form:

These two statements obviously conflict and make shocking claims given our discussion in the previous section. In general, if this antinomy accurately inscribes Habermasian textual topology, how could Habermas – whose detailed work on Kantian reason in the first and ninth chapters of Knowledge and Human Interests demonstrates his insight into the impossibility of occupying an unconditional epistemological standpoint to render a judgment of existence – seemingly ignore this insight, posit a limit and cast such a judgment? We first focus on how the above set of conflicting propositions overcomes the more primordial impasse Gadamer directly confronts. In contrast to the resolution of the mathematical antinomy whereby both propositions were deemed false because of an illegitimate assertion of existence, we find Habermas effectively declaring these dynamical propositions to be both true and not contradictory. We then formulate an antinomy which more faithfully encapsulates Habermas' project and allows for a more fruitful comparison with Gadamer.

Numerous passages in Habermas' texts testify to his understanding of the logic of the symbolic order, of the S2. For instance, in explicit agreement with Gadamer's 'basic methodological axiom,' he repeatedly insists how the ideal of a complete description of the historical event of the start of the Thirty Years War cannot be consistently formulated as the historian 'cannot grasp anything that he can know historically independently of the framework of his own life-practice.' (Habermas 1990: 224, 229) Yet he proceeds to argue that despite this 'standard of pure theory' an objectivity can nevertheless be reached because every historian implicitly proceeds as if he is writing a universal history.13 The emphasis here is crucial. It is not that Habermas departs from the unshakable rule of reason which holds the positing of the limit required for a meta-language position to be impossible. Rather, he covers over its lack by prohibiting its impossibility, as in the following statement: 'Because every world that is articulated in a language is a totality, the horizon of a language also encompasses that which it is not.... For this reason, the limits of the world that it defines are not irrevocable.' (ibid 217) With this statement, Habermas effectively says 'no' to the impossibility of meta-language. This act establishes a limit, for claimed here is how there is no such thing as extra-linguistic causality when it comes to the objectivations of the world. Such a negative judgment is an addition (of an S1) to the indefinite series of signifiers (S2) of what cannot be included in that series, thereby rendering the inconceivability of extra-linguistic causality conceivable. In this way the indefinite series of signifiers is transformed into a closed set and becomes capable of signifying everything because it now includes (in negative representational form) that which eludes it.14 Linguistic laws can now account for all objectivations which, precisely as delimited, suddenly emerge into existence. Accordingly, we find Habermas admonishing Gadamer to restrict the hermeneutic approach, for the fact that the framework of tradition has limits means that the 'reference system can no longer leave tradition undetermined... thereby enabling us to designate the conditions outside tradition under which transcendental rules of world-comprehension and of action empirically change.' The appropriation of tradition as such becomes possible because tradition now exists. (ibid 238–41)

This supplementation of an extra-linguistic causality qua limitation to the causality which accords with linguistic laws is the thetic account of the shift from Gadamerian to Habermasian space. But an equally true account is offered by the antithesis, only this time the shift involves a subtraction and not an addition. Here we encounter the other half of a Habermasian text, those long and difficult passages which provide no causal explanation for our objective knowledge of the world other than those lawful transcendental structures embedded in the grammatical rules of ordinary language. (eg, Habermas 1971: 192f) Whereas the very structure of the antinomy we initially presented to Gadamer had to be reconfigured because an illegitimate surplus of existence implicitly saddled each proposition, in the case of Habermas there is no need to abandon the propositions. Rather, the surplus on the side of the dynamical antinomy, which here takes the form of an extra-linguistic causality, is quietly subtracted from these passages since this founding Cause cannot be tolerated by the very transcendental causal nexus it founds. This subtractive act (again marked by S1) installs the limit lacking in the mathematical field and thereby covers over the fundamental impasse to which Gadamer stands steadfast, resulting in a radically different topological space to the one we defined above for Gadamer. Interestingly, this difference is evidenced at the level of their respective writing styles and resonates as well at the phenomenal level by the impressions their texts leave on the reader. In the first case, because of the fundamental homogeneity of the mathematical field where all elements belong to the same spatiotemporal series and where all phenomena remain objects of experience unable to objectivate into existence, the reader of a Gadamerian text is left with an overall impression of inconsistency.15 But with a Habermasian text, because it articulates the fundamental heterogeneity of the dynamical field where the limiting causal force of a different (noumenal, intelligible) order is capable of suspending the causal (phenomenal, sensuous) nexus, the reader is left instead with an overall impression of incompleteness.16 In a word, where Gadamer gives us too much meaning, Habermas provides too little.

To get a fuller picture of the Habermasian project, we need to reformulate the above set of propositions into a new antinomy.17 Fortunately Habermas himself clearly and concisely articulates his own antonymic split in an essay critical of Gadamer's hermeneutic claim to universality. He does so when proposing an objective method to bypass the fact that 'hermeneutical understanding always has to proceed in an ad hoc way,' which in our terms was described as an indefinitely proceeding series of historical phenomena. He asks himself the following question: 'Can there be an understanding of meaning in relation to symbolic structures formulated in everyday language that is not tied to the hermeneutic pre-supposition of context-dependent processes of understanding?' and outlines an answer in the affirmative in two ways across two brief paragraphs which effectively sketches out his overall project. (Habermas 1990: 252–3) This is as we would expect if we read the first paragraph as providing the thesis and the second the antithesis of a dynamical antinomy which efficiently captures the topological space his project is simultaneously situated within and textually delimits. We discuss and expand upon the following propositions in turn:

With regards to the thetic proposition, Habermas argues in the first paragraph that 'we hit upon a non-trivial limit to the sphere of hermeneutical understanding in cases which are dealt with by psychoanalysis,' but whose interpretive framework when properly conceived allows us to transcend this limit. (ibid 252) Again what we have here is the installation of a limit through the negative judgment of what is beyond that limit, providing closure to the open set of what can be known. An explanation for this is found in the final three chapters of Knowledge and Human Interests which offer a conception of the Freudian unconscious as a form of self-alienation whereby the subject's communication with himself becomes interrupted due to the ego's functions of adapting and censoring socially undesired motivations. Habermas charges the Freudian model of Id-Ego-Superego with failing to capture the true nature of psychoanalytic practice, arguing that it is not enough for the subject to comprehend the causal explanation of the symptom offered by the analyst. What Freud supposedly overlooked is something Habermas emphasizes throughout all his texts – self-reflection – which is notably the 'negative side' to those functions of the ego. (Habermas 1971: 245) At the very core of Habermas' conception of the psychoanalytic cure thus resides a negative judgment of an alienated self which installs a limit and completes the self: 'For the insight to which analysis is to lead is indeed only this: that the ego of the patient recognize itself in its other, represented by its illness, as in its own alienated self and identify with it.' (ibid 235–6) For Habermas, the subject can re-appropriate his alienated substance so long as his true motivations are reflected as coinciding with the expressed meaning constitutive of the metaphoric content of his ego.

His reading of psychoanalysis forms the basis for his critique of ideology which likewise applies hermeneutic understanding to similar 'points of rupture,' only this time at the level of collective phenomena like intersubjective communication.18 (Habermas 1990: 219) Again he does this because '[h]ermeneutical consciousness remains incomplete as long as it does not include a reflection upon the limits of hermeneutic understanding' and because such reflection makes it 'possible for us to determine what we do not – yet – know when we try to make sense of an incomprehensible complex of meaning.' (ibid 253–4) Such statements abound in his work, but there is a curiosity to them. For if (self)reflection operates as a negative judgment which installs the limit to phenomena as we suggested above, then Habermas overlooks how an act of reflection installs the very limit it reflects upon. Once this tautological gesture is grasped, it immediately becomes clear that the two propositions of any dynamical antinomy must be stated and judged to be simultaneously true because the status of the installed limit is paradoxical, being neither entirely missing nor included in the set of the objectivations of thought. The ambiguity is traceable back to the fact that the installation of a limit always stands as a secondary gesture to the primordial lack of limitation. Hence the mathematical antinomy must be said to be logically prior to the dynamical and so Habermas' reflective application of a hermeneutical consciousness to points of rupture must likewise be seen as a gesture which covers over the more primordial rupture faithfully expounded upon by Gadamer.

This masculine gesture is key to understanding the antithetic claim that all objectivations in language can be recognized, for only through it is the loss of the impossible 'real object' correlative to the primordial lack of limit thereby marked out. Because of the priority of the feminine, in truth this object should appear to us as already lost. But for Habermas its mere loss could ideally be re-appropriated and we accordingly find him holding out for a future regulative system which could do just that, one which adequately defines general linguistic competence sufficiently well enough to replace the hermeneutical understanding of meaning. (ibid 253) However, it is crucial to understand just how the Habermasian project achieves its confidence that all objectivations (such as tradition) could be sufficiently grasped. Not only does he portray his project as one which devotes its efforts toward the reconstruction of rational discourse; at the same time it is a project thoroughly oriented by its regulative principle, which we have marked by S1. This means that Habermas' strictly non-Platonic ideal of a full knowledge of objectivations can be had only on an infinite asymptotic approach through the neutral transcendental grid of language. More precisely, as Habermas sets language itself as the ideal goal, the ideal 'communication without constraint' will necessarily be approached along an asymptotic path strewn with distorting contingent historical forces which enter in from the externalized outside of language. Inversely, the subject's project of overcoming these empirical hindrances is only possible within a framework which institutes the co-ordinates of time and space 'outside' of time and space. In other words, at the heart of Habermas' project is a covering over of the defining internal limit of reason with the external limit of a presupposed future time and space which somehow extends beyond reason. From within feminine space the entire project is illegitimate and Gadamer accordingly warns against viewing 'the "results" of the interpretive process... in terms of progress' because '[h]ermeneutic reflection cannot be detached from hermeneutic praxis,' that is, the logic of the latter stands prior to that of the former. (Gadamer 1990: 283) Yet from within masculine space, claims like how the finite subject aspires in the 'role of the last historian' and how 'the intersubjectivity of everyday communication is principally as unlimited as it is restricted; it is unlimited because it can be extended ad libitum; it is restricted because it can never be completely achieved' become readily understandable and are quite legitimate to make.19 (Habermas 1990: 229, 246)

It should be clear that Habermas derives his confidence from the gesture of S1 which transforms the inconsistent S2 into an Other guaranteeing consistency to the world, tradition and any other objectivations found therein. Of course, Habermas does not utilize a correspondence theory of truth whereby, say, ideological disillusions are discernible against the 'way things really are.' The problem with his discussion of Feud's 'reality testing' is not that he conceives it as matching perceptions to an external independent reality but rather how he fails to notice that the precondition for judging whether our perceptions are objective is the permanent loss of that reality. (cf. Habermas 1971: 238f) Because of the covering over by the negative judgment, the insight is lost into how every empirical object found is a re-finding of that real object which indexes the loss of reality. This logic forms the backdrop to understanding Gadamer's critique of Habermas' metaphysics/epistemology in the name of ontology.20 Hence accusations that Habermas grasps a being that is false. Otherwise said, the epistemological claim to have found through reflection an objectivated existence is always the re-finding of it, for its objectivity is grasped only insofar as it is indexed to the excluded real object.21 This means that our perceptions of reality will always necessarily be somewhat distorted as they only ever inexactly reference this real object. For Habermas such distortions emerge necessarily as empirical obstacles of suspicious origins encountered on the road to the gradual realization of the transcendental regulative idea of non-authoritative discourse. Here is the authoritative effect of S1 which we noted was inoperative in the mathematical field. Accordingly, Gadamer's operative notion of power is depicted as a 'natural authority' innocuously entrenched in the S2 of 'concrete experience.' (Gadamer 1990: 287) While in contrast to him, because S1 is externalized out from its inherent embeddedness in S2, Habermas is not only assured of objectivations and is able to conceptualize how terms like tradition and class domination have an externalized existence; he is also alert to the prominent and disturbing authoritative presence of S1 dwelling in every rational and traditional field.22 Hence his correction for Gadamer and his wonder at how the latter 'does not see any opposition between authority and reason. The authority of tradition does not assert itself blindly but only through its reflective recognition.' (Habermas 1990: 268) Our analysis of Habermasian reflection as the negative judgment which externalizes the S1 from S2 confirms that a literal reading of the last sentence is completely warranted.

The driving force behind Habermas' project is an emancipatory struggle for freedom and we would be remiss if we did not directly comment on his conception of freedom and his theory of human interests. In his 'Retrospect on Kant and Fichte' which forms the ninth chapter of Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas explicitly takes on the key question of Kant's practical philosophy of how freedom is possible in a discussion which further confirms for us that he operates from within a masculine space. Also briefly discussing the antinomy chapter of the first Critique (in fact even citing from Kant's observations on the third antinomy – the very one upon which we modeled the first Habermasian antinomy above), the problem discernible in his analysis concerns how he ultimately subsumes reason to interest. On a first approach, Habermas in no way deviates from the core of Kant's thought when proposing his own solution to the question of freedom's possibility. For his solution amounts to a move from mathematical to dynamical logic: reason's 'inherent drive to realize reason' allows the conception of reason's lack of limit as a 'pure interest' which, as a 'limiting concept,' effectively covers over the inherent limitation of reason by imposing an external limit. (Habermas 1971: 201–2) As we saw, this engenders his a priori universal framework and once in place his emancipatory struggle for freedom can begin,23 in parallel fashion to Kant's own project of erecting a transcendental system to categorize phenomenal approximations to the noumenal thing-in-itself. On a second approach, Habermas is mistaken when arguing that idealism erroneously believes 'that reason can become transparent to itself by providing its own foundation' so that merely providing the supposed missing foundation (as he sets out to do) qualifies as a critique of idealism. (ibid 287) As we saw in the above section on Gadamer, reason is well aware that it cannot grasp its object as that object does not exist. But at the same time this failure of reason is its primary source of strength and accordingly reason has no need for supplementary support in any universalized system of objectivations. Thus Habermas exposes his misunderstanding of the true nature of reason when subsequently stressing how 'it is reason that inheres in interest.' (ibid) In a thoroughly masculine gesture, what constitutes the universal field of cognitive interests to which reason takes second seat24 is of course the exceptional, prohibited and emancipatory act of self-reflection.

In an article on the Gadamer-Habermas debate, Ricoeur correctly notes the exceptional status the interest in emancipation has for Habermas when saying the latter 'dogmatically' asserts its distinction from the interest inherent to the historical-hermeneutical sciences. Yet he simply misses the point by suggesting that because this distinction reveals emancipatory interest to be 'quite empty and abstract' it should be dismissed. For as we have seen, it is essential to the Habermasian project to have an operational framework with precisely 'no other positive content than the ideal of unrestricted and unconstrained communication.' (Ricoeur 329) Hence Ricoeur goes much further than his stated intention in the introduction to 'mark out a place' in Habermas for Gadamer (and vice versa).This is because his conflation of emancipatory with practical interests effectively dissolves Habermas' project. Faring better is Ricoeur's effort to conceive the Gadamerian conception of finitude as standing a priori to the Habermasian one, but the absence of a rigorous analysis of what specifically accounts for their difference leads him to erroneously conceive this logical priority as 'a common ground.' (ibid) There are also issues with how Ricoeur seeks to 'mark out a place' in Gadamer for Habermas. For instance, his reversion of philosophical hermeneutics to exegesis and philology must be read as extending autonomy to texts. (ibid 324–5) But this fails to respect Gadamer's strict concern not with the existential ramifications of such objectivations but with their ontological status. Similarly, claiming that 'the production of discourse as work involves an objectifcation that enables it to be read in existential conditions' is also of no concern to Gadamer. Much less the claim that because such discourse 'takes hold' in structures calling for a mediation of understanding by explanation, one must abandon its 'ruinuous dichotomy inherited from Dilthey:' while it is legitimate to speak of the structure of the Other with Habermas, this is not the case with Gadamer. Ricoeur's attempt to unite the two theorists through an impossible dialectic between meaning-effect and the structural mechanism of the symbolic Other (where the former, we must add, only comes at a price of overlooking the latter) exposes a fatal misunderstanding of the sexuated orientation of each debater's respective project and conception of language. (ibid 325–6) Lastly, arguing how the gap between the interpreting subject and the text is productive (as it sets into motion a dialectical process which introduces a critical dimension) disregards Gadamer's insight into the lack of any limitation which could account for such a gap. At any rate when speaking of the interaction of the reader and the text, in psychoanalytic terms Ricoeur is really talking about subjectivization (not subjectivity) which provides meaningful 'weight' to the void of the subject. Indeed the very phrase 'imaginative variation of the ego' implies as much and thus his criticism falls flat since a notion of the subject qua subjectivization is already fully operational in Gadamer. (ibid 327–8)

Overall, the attempt of Ricoeur 'to confirm Gadamer's view that the two "universalities," that of hermeneutics and that of the critique of ideology, are interpenetrating' betrays his belief in the sexual relation in stark contrast to the thesis of this paper. (ibid 328) For we have seen that the respective 'universes' occupied by Habermas and Gadamer are not symmetrical and cannot be conceived as complements of each other. Habermas does not make up for what is lacking in Gadamer and Gadamer does not complete Habermas. Believing otherwise mistakenly presupposes that both fall under the universal quantifier of All. But the All does not modify the Gadamerian Not-all and its articulation of a universe impossible to construct. Rather, the logic of the All is applicable only to the Habermasian universal which comes into existence through the prohibitive gesture of a negative judgment installing a limit. So when Ricoeur tells us 'that each of the two theories speaks from a different place' and that he hopes to show that each is capable of bearing the mark of the other's claim to universality, we must see this as a masculine resolution to the debate.25 (ibid 299) Thinking in terms of 'places' too easily invokes the masculine universal. Even his claim that the Gadamer-Habermas debate 'raises the question of what I shall call the fundamental gesture of philosophy' gives up too much on this score. (ibid 298) In contrast, this paper endeavors to show how Gadamer and Habermas relate to each other from their own 'space' and since this space is sexuated, their debate is exemplary in delimiting the topological contours of the very foundation of philosophy itself. At the end of his article and perhaps most tellingly on his part, Ricoeur characterizes the debate as a false 'antinomy between an ontology of prior understanding and an eschatology of freedom' which can be dismissed accordingly since both propositions of this antinomy can be thought simultaneously as true. (ibid 332) But this is a one-sided masculine resolution to the debate which itself must be rejected as it abolishes the radical separateness of the two debaters. For the gap must be maintained between Gadamer and Habermas as each side is uniquely antonymic and thus split differently, and it is this difference that accounts for their difference.

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