Commentary on Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures
copyright 1985 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main (Germany)
translated by Frederick Lawrence
published 1987 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press (Cambridge)

Introduction by Thomas McCarthy

I. Modernity’s Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance

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II. Hegel’s Concept of Modernity

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Excursus on Schiller’s “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”

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III. Three Perspectives: Left Hegelians, Right Hegelians, and Nietzsche

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Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm

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IV. The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point

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V. The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

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VI. The Undermining of Western Rationalism through the Critique of Metaphysics: Martin Heidegger

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VII. Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida’s Critique of Phonocentrism

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Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature

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VIII. Between Eroticism and General Economics: Georges Bataille

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IX. The Critique of Reason as an Unmasking of the Human Sciences: Michel Foucault

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X. Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again

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XI. An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason

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Excursus on Cornelius Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution

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XII. The Normative Content of Modernity

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Excursus on Luhmann’s Appropriation of the Philosophy of the Subject through Systems Theory

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Notes

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