as the defining characteristic of human beings and the qualitative leap from
hominids to human beings, which recalls Chomsky’s thinking on the genetic
endowment of the human species, makes it possible to forget a causal link
between labour and language: that the objectivity of labour in common
produces in human beings the subjectivity of which language is the symptom,
the vector and the instrument. Putting Habermas back on his feet, understanding
that his first philosophy is, in reality, an eschatological hope, is a better way
of understanding the emergence of language (a notoriously obscure
phenomenon that can only be approached by the most speculative of
philosophical speculation – i.e. a myth of origins: like Habermas’s or like the
one I attribute to Marx), and its character as a social practice, to which I shall
return. Incidentally, it is also a way of providing ourselves with resources for
understanding the nature of art, which (according to Lukács’s aesthetics at
least) re-runs the process of subjectivation that led humanity to make the
transition from industrious objectivity to linguistic subjectivity.^10
Nevertheless, it is not enough to put Habermas back on his feet. We must
also explain why he is standing on his head. The thesis that I wish to defend
here is that there is a Habermasian conjuncture, a historical moment when
Habermas is a major philosopher; when his philosophy of language, law
and politics is, as they say, key; when his exit from Marxism is justified
and perhaps even inevitable; and when his ethics of discussion seems to be
the most adequate framework in which to think about society. Today, this
conjuncture has passed.
Roughly speaking, the Habermasian conjuncture corresponds to the years
1975–95. And it is explained by the combination of two politico-cultural
factors. The first is post-Nazism. Habermas, who was fifteen in 1945, was
formed in a society and culture haunted by the need to rid itself of the
authoritarianism and totalitarianism of Nazism. In this sense, his philosophical
antonym and sometimes his explicit antagonist is Carl Schmitt. This negative
requirement was accompanied by a positive requirement: that of thinking
through what has been called the trente glorieuses, the post-war economic and
social conjuncture in Western industrialised societies, marked by the triumph
of parliamentary democracy, the integration of the working class into the
welfare state, the end of imperialism – at least in its most brutal and brazen
Critique of the Philosophy of Language • 59(^10) See Lukács 1981.