Mimesis and Reason: Habermas's Political Philosophy

Coda: Habermas and the Affective Bond of Understanding

Coda Habermas and the Affective Bond of Understanding We can explain what a fact is only with the help of the truth of a statement of fact, and we can explain what is real only in terms of what is true. Being, as Tugendhat says, is veritative being. Since the WUXWKRIEHOLHIVRUVHQWHQFHVFDQLQWXUQEHMXVWLßHGRQO\ZLWKWKHKHOS of other beliefs and sentences, we cannot break free from the magic circle of our language. —Jürgen Habermas (1998c, 357) Experience is communicative experience. —Jürgen Habermas (1995b, 107) [I]ntersubjective understanding, because it is a communicative experience, cannot be carried out in a solipsistic manner. Understanding [Verstehen] a symbolic expression fundamentally requires participation in a process of reaching understanding [Verständigung]. —Jürgen Habermas (1984, 112) As should be clear from the course of my argument, the opposition between mimesis and reason is sensible only in a metaphysical light. In The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, Strong and Sposito argue that “Habermas’s thought should require that he retain the postmodernists 137 138 Mimesis and Reason as other and not seek to eliminate them as enemies” (1995, 269). Within postmetaphysical thinking, Habermas need not treat the postmoderns as enemies, nor retain them as other, for their insights get taken up into his own sublation insofar as communicative action is intersubjective, inexorably temporal, and therefore continually integrating, disintegrating, and reconstituting itself. In posing their view in the way they do, Strong and Sposito, as well as many friendly and unfriendly readers alike, miss how +DEHUPDVÖV ßJXUH RI FRPPXQLFDWLYH DFWLRQ DWWHPSWV WR SUHVHUYH ZKLOH transcending the opposition between mimesis and reason. Since Plato, the philosophical tradition is replete with the use of the rhetorical tactic that denigrates mimesis (as irrational) only to recommend covertly another form RI UDWLRQDO  PLPHVLV FRQVLGHUHG PRUH VLJQLßFDQW PRUH GHIHQVLEOH PRUH OHJLWLPDWHÔEHFDXVHZLWKLQWKLVWUDGLWLRQPLPHVLVLVDßJXUHWKDWFDQQRW be resisted. The common misconception trusts too much in Habermas’s polemics against mimesis, and so remains blind to how Habermas deploys pantomimesis himself. If we push Habermas’s thought more explicitly in the direction it implicitly leads us, given his appropriations of Platonic mimesis, Meadian mimesis, and Benjaminian mimesis, communicative action carries within it the tension between mimesis and reason in a new, temporal model of LPPDQHQWGLVWDQFHSUHVHUYHGDVLQWHUVXEMHFWLYLW\LQWKHOLQJXLVWLßFDWLRQRI the sacred, the shock of ErlebnisGHàDWHGLQWKHDUWLFXODWHQRZRISURVDLF intersubjective Erfahrung. It is a risky philosophical gambit to be sure because this process of reaching understanding destabilizes from within the (false) sense of security proffered by adherence to speech norms, yet it is what the critique, avowal and creative renewal of meaning in this world requires. Pantomimesis is the mode of communicative action, producing in its course the articulate, affectual bond among speakers who are transformed in the experience. The unforced force felt in this bond of understanding is communicative action’s offering to the problem of meaning and motivation in modernity.1 Benjamin (1999b) provides an extremely helpful rendering of the affect I have in mind, so long as, consistent with Habermas’s project, we attenuate its monumentality and release its meaning-horizon from a VWULFWO\UHOLJLRXVLGLRP+HWHOOVXVRIDGUHDPZKHUHKHßQGVKLPVHOILQ front of the Notre Dame Cathedral, but “too close.” His intimate proximity renders him “overwhelmed” by a “yearning,” a desire for that which he already has, to be right there, in front of Notre Dame. How is it that KLV EHLQJ WKHUH KDV QRW \HW VDWLVßHG KLV \HDUQLQJ WR EH WKHUH" +RZ LV LW WKDW KLV GHVLUH LV RQO\ KHLJKWHQHG DQG PDGH PRUH FRQYROXWHG" %HQMDPLQ describes it thusly: “It was the blissful yearning that has already crossed the threshold of image and possession, and knows only the power of the 139 Habermas and the Affective Bond of Understanding name—the power from which the loved one lives, is transformed, ages, rejuvenates itself, and imageless, is the refuge of all images” (269). The power inherent in mimetic communication is such as to allow in its light what may happen next. The authority granted by mimetic contact—what I am arguing occurs in the event process of communicative action—is such that it stands, now, outside of processes of legitimation or discursive tinkerLQJ EXWRIFRXUVHGHSOR\LQJDVLWVPHGLXPWKHOLQJXLVWLFDQGMXVWL...