Frieder Vogelmann

Does Habermas have the conceptual resources to not only rationally reconstruct the political shape of the European Union as a supranational democracy with a “shared sovereignty” between European citizens and member states, but to also rationally reconstruct the economic practices and processes? My answer will be in the affirmative, and my argument takes the form of an exemplary sketch how such a reconstruction might look like. It is, however, nothing more than a sketch because both rational reconstructions are so far-reaching that they amount to reconstructive revolutions. Obviously, some presuppositions need to be addressed. My question is triggered by an asymmetry in Habermas’ writings on Europe, an asymmetry I will explicate together with the methodological premises of those writings. Hence, I will first turn to the method of rational reconstruction which Habermas uses for his analysis of the European Union. My third step will be to suggest that the economy is unnecessarily excluded from these considerations and I will present one possibility how a rational reconstruction of economic practices might look like – and where it gets a footing in those practices even if we strive to uphold the distinction between system and lifeworld. Finally, I will answer two obvious objections.

Although the governmentality literature has occasionally acknowledged the importance of the concept of a liberal truth-regime, there has never been a thorough investi-gation of the role it plays in Foucault’s governmentality lectures. Therefore, this paper begins with an examination of the lectures’ “archaeological dimension” that leads to two claims: First, it shows that the crucial conceptual tool in the lectures is the question about the relation to truth that a particular political rationality possesses. Only by looking at the changing truth-regimes of the liberal governmentalities will their differences and continuities come into full contrast. The article’s second claim is that this conceptually sharpened understanding of the political rationalities is required for a diagnosis of the present, which reveals that today’s dominant governmentality is no longer neo-liberalism but a new liberal rationality: neosocial market economy.

Klaus Günther’s discourse theory of law links the concept of criminal responsibility with the legitimacy of democratic law. Because attributions of criminal responsibility are always aimed at a person, they contain an implicit conception of the person. In a democracy under the rule of law, Günther argues, this conception of a person must be understood, as a “deliberative person”, a free and autonomous person capable of being both the addressee and the author of legal norms. The “deliberative person” is the conceptual core of criminal responsibility, yet Günther develops it using a concept of “communicative accountability” modeled on the concept of criminal responsibility that it is designed to explicate. My aim is to bring this circular grounding of criminal responsibility into view and argue that Günther’s discourse theory of law is based on a legalized picture of discourse.

Review of the following books: Michael Ruoff: Foucault-Lexikon, München 2007. Fink/UTB. Clemens Kammler, Rolf Parr und Ulrich Johannes Schneider (Hrsg.): Foucault-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, Stuttgart 2008. Metzler. Paul Veyne: Foucault. Der Philosoph als Samurai, Stuttgart 2009. Reclam. Thomas Lemke: Gouvernementalität und Biopolitik, Wiesbaden 2007. VS Verlag. Patricia Purtschert, Katrin Meyer und Yves Winter (Hrsg.): Gouvernementalität und Sicherheit. Zeitdiagnostische Beiträge im Anschluss an Foucault, Bielefeld 2008. Transcript. Daniel Hechler und Axel Philipps (Hrsg.): Widerstand denken. Michel Foucault und die Grenzen der Macht, Bielefeld 2008. Transcript. Jeffrey T. Nealon: Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifi cations since 1984, Stanford 2008. Stanford University Press. Amy Allen: The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, New York 2008. Columbia University Press. Wendy Brown: Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton 2006. Princeton University Press. Giorgio Agamben: Was ist ein Dispositiv?, Zürich-Berlin 2008. Diaphanes. Philipp Sarasin: Darwin und Foucault. Genealogie und Geschichte im Zeitalter der Biologie, Frankfurt/M. 2008. Suhrkamp.

Was bedeutet die steile Karriere von Verantwortung (nicht nur) in der Philosophie, und welchen Preis zahlen wir dafür? Dass große Teile der modernen Philosophie ihr verfallen sind, so die zentrale These, bezahlt diese mit Blindheit für die theoretischen wie praktischen Auswirkungen von Verantwortung. Um sie zu analysieren, muss Verantwortung als diskursiven Operator verstanden werden, dessen Einheit im ambivalenten Selbstverhältnis der Verantwortung Tragenden liegt. Seine praktischen Auswirkungen werden exemplarisch in den Praktiken der Arbeit und der Kriminalität studiert, in denen das verantwortliche Selbstverhältnis intensiviert und zugleich von der Voraussetzung substantieller Handlungsmacht entkoppelt wird. So hilft Verantwortung, eine unternehmerische Logik in die Selbstverhältnisse zunehmend entmachteter Lohnarbeiterinnen und »Arbeitsloser« einzuschmelzen sowie die Bürgerinnen aktiv in die präventiv gewendete Kriminalpolitik einer auf öffentliche Sicherheit fixierten Gesellschaft einzubinden. Die theoretischen Auswirkungen werden anhand der Genealogie von Verantwortung innerhalb der Philosophie analysiert, in der sich Verantwortung vom Instrument in der metaphysischen Debatte um Willensfreiheit zu einem eigenständigen moralischen Problem und schließlich zur Gewissheit wandelt, mit der andere philosophische Fragen erklärt werden. Fixpunkt aller Reflexionen bleibt das ambivalente verantwortliche Selbstverhältnis als aktiver Umgang mit dem Faktum des eigenen Unterwerfens – sowohl dem Unterworfen-sein als auch dem Unterwerfen Anderer. Das zum Faktum erklärte Unterwerfen erlaubt dem Subjekt, sich unabhängig von seiner tatsächlichen Handlungsmacht als souverän zu erleben, und bildet den verborgenen Kern des verantwortlichen Selbstverhältnisses. Weil Verantwortung aber zunehmen gebraucht wird, um die Bindungskraft von Normativität als ureigenes Gebiet der Philosophie zu explizieren, verleitet ihre Attraktivität dazu, diese Selbstobjektivierung zu übersehen oder zu leugnen und den praktischen Gebrauch der philosophischen Legitimierungen von Verantwortung auszublenden. Dagegen setzt dieses Buch eine diagnostische Kritik, die den Bann der Verantwortung wenn nicht bricht, so doch entlarvt.

In this paper we pose the question what constitutes the originality of governmentality as a state analytical framework by confronting it with alternative contemporary approaches in state theory, suggesting that the latter may already contain many of the insights Foucaultians sometimes tend to ascribe to the governmentality perspective exclusively and thus run the risk of reinventing the state theoretical wheel. Still, we argue that there is something unique to the governmentality perspective, namely a particular kind of unwieldy knowledge about the state it aims to produce. Generating such knowledge would no longer be state theory but rather state philosophy in a specifically Foucaultian sense.

Most conceptual analyses of responsibility fail to sufficiently account for the historicity of the concept – both within philosophical reflections and within non-philosophical practices. Three frequently encountered problems are: First, “responsibility” is often read retrospectively in texts where the concept is not present; second, the necessary and sufficient conditions that account for responsibility’s meaning are often derived from contemporary usage alone; and third, the non-philosophical usage of “responsibility” is often dismissed as “defective” too quickly. To avoid all three problems, I argue for a Foucauldian analysis of practices in which “responsibility” is used.

Does truth have a history? Whereas Bernard William denies it and only allows a history of truthfulness, I defend the possibility of a critical history or genealogy of truth. Because a trifling relativistic historicization of truth leads to a paradoxically a-historic and pacifistic conception of truth, one must first establish the methodological concepts with which a genealogy of truth can avoid both problems. Three first steps towards such concepts can be found in some of Michel Foucault’s lectures, which lead the genealogy of truth to focus on the origins of truth’s force.