Abstract

This dissertation raises the question of political critique through a discussion of the philosophical debate between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Juergen Habermas. If all of our resources for critique are available to us on the basis of the way in which we grow into language and tradition--as must be maintained from the standpoint of Gadamer's hermeneutics--then how is a critique of language and tradition possible? After rejecting Habermas' conception of critique, which requires the establishment of an independent frame of reference, and after accepting Gadamer's argument that hermeneutics accommodates critique, this dissertation undertakes a systematic analysis of the conditions under which political critique is possible in the wake of hermeneutics. ;Three conditions for the possibility of critique are identified and treated separately in the dissertation's three parts. For critique to address language's current way of speaking, the relationship between language and being must be such that language is always capable of reaching out toward what remains unspoken. This capacity of language is explored by means of an analysis of Martin Heidegger's conception of truth as the unconcealment of being and of language as the home of the truth of being. Critique emerges here as the reaching out of language toward the concealing/unconcealing play of being. Imagination accomplishes this reaching out and the treatment of its possibility requires a critical appropriation of Immanuel Kant's conception of imagination which recasts it as the spontaneous capacity of language for a gathering which attends to the concealing/unconcealing play of being. The political associations of this imaginative gathering are explored in connection with Hannah Arendt's conception of political judgement and Cornelius Castoriadis' discussion of the institution of society. The activity of imagination is possible only in response to some practical occasion for critique. Alienation is taken as the name for this occasion; for, since alienation refers to a crisis which is both political and ontological, the critique which it inspires responds both to practical concerns and to the truth of being. ;This dissertation establishes that only under these three conditions is critique possible