ABSTRACT Axel Honneth deploys the categories of normal and pathological to explain contemporary society in organic terms. This article concerns itself with how these medical references function in Honneth's work to explain the social world, and what their political implications are. For Honneth, social normality is a normative resource, even if it is only accessible through the study of pathology. Socially accepted norms are taken to reflect legitimate principles, with the early Honneth taking pathology as an individual psychic suffering that (...) results from injustice, and the later Honneth taking pathology as an overextension of the logic of one social sphere into the terrain of another. The implications of Honneth's organic account of society are explored through the lens of a competing “French” account of the norm offered by Canguilhem and Foucault. These French thinkers view socially accepted norms not as reflecting legitimate principles, but as standardizing processes of normalization that stifle normativities that do not conform. It is suggested that Honneth's account of normativity must be articulated with Canguilhem's and Foucault's account of normalization. That said, through the course of the analysis, several unexpected continuities are discovered between these two different traditions. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates that when the concept of ethicalpolitical responsibility is taken in its modern sense as a decision or outcome based on the protocols of reason, responsibility is neither simply possible nor simply impossible. Paradoxically, it appeals to a demand that it cannot fulfil; responsibility is thus (im)possible. Moreover, insofar as a deconstructive demonstration of this aporia is itself a response to reason’s own demand, deconstruction cannot be characterized as simply responsible or irresponsible. Rather, deconstruction inscribes itself as the (...) interior limit of the order of ethics, of responsibility, as such. Deconstruction is thus characterized best as an (ir)responsible interrogation of the very principle of reason to which political philosophers such as Habermas appeal when they invoke responsibility. To this extent deconstruction enacts the strange responsibility of interrogating critically precisely what is deemed ‘just’. Key Words: critique • deconstruction • Derrida • Enlightenment • ethics • Habermas • justice • modernity • reason • responsibility. (shrink)

This contribution is a critical and constructive engage ment with discourse ethics. First, it clarifies why discourse ethics has difficulties with the grounding and application of moral norms. Second, it turns to a positive appropriation of the formal and proce dural aspects of discourse ethics. The goal is the elaboration of an ethics that is able to incorporate the material aspects of goods and the formal dimension of ethical validity and consensuability. Every morality is the formal application of some substantive (...) good. Every ethical perspective demands its evaluation in terms of its uni versability. In order to achieve this mediation, it is suggested that we must incorporate not only the historical dimension of moral systems, but also the role of critical consciousness and the negativity embod ied by those who are victims of the existing consensus. The essay con cludes with six points that need to be considered when formulating a material ethics that is universalizable and, most importantly, that can address the massive poverty and dehumanization of those excluded from the present community of communication. Key Words: application • consensual • corporeality • discourse ethics • formal • grounding • intersubjective • Kantian • liberation • ethics • material • phronesis • procedural • validity. (shrink)