Mimesis and Reason: Habermas's Political Philosophy

Contents

Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Reason and Mimesis 9 I. The Postmetaphysical Condition of Reason 10 II. Mimesis 14 III. Mimesis Against Disenchantment 20 IV. Mimesis as Re-Enchantment? 28 V. Toward a Reconstruction of Communicative Action 33 Chapter 2 Mimesis in Communicative Action: Habermas and Plato 35 I. Modernity and its Anti-Mimetic Cogito 36 II. Divine Mimesis 41 III. Prosaic Mimesis 49 IV. Poetic Mimesis 53 V. The Manner of Mimesis 56 VI. The Grammar of Mimesis 60 VII. Toward the Affective Bond of Understanding 63 Chapter 3 The Subject in Communicative Action: Habermas and George Herbert Mead 69 I. Two Phases of the Self: I and Me 71 II. The Individuated Self 76 III. From Play to Game 81 IV. From Image to Symbol 86 V. I the Artist 90 VI. Mead’s Anti-mimesis 94 VII. Habermas’s Intersubjective Ego 100 vi Contents Chapter 4 The Experience of Mimesis: Habermas and Walter Benjamin 109 I. Weberian Pneuma 113 II. Experience 115 III. Lament for Experience (Erfahrung) Lost 117 IV. Shock and Wisdom in Postauratic Experience 121 V. Postauratic Experience as Mimesis in Language 124 VI. Habermas’s Benjaminian Experience 129 VII. Conclusions 135 Coda: Habermas and the Affective Bond of Understanding 137 Notes 143 Bibliography 169 Index 183 ...