Amy Allen

Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Jürgen Habermas - one of the most important European philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - has produced a prodigious and influential body of work. In this Lexicon, authored by an international team of scholars, over 200 entries define and explain the key concepts, categories, philosophemes, themes, debates, and names associated with the entire constellation of Habermas's thought. The entries explore the historical, philosophical and social-theoretic roots of these terms and concepts, as well as their intellectual and disciplinary contexts, to build a broad but detailed picture of the development and trajectory of Habermas as a thinker. The volume will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Habermas, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, political science, sociology, international relations, cultural studies, and law.

My dissertation formulates a conception of power adequate for feminist theory. I begin by reconstructing competing conceptions of power implicit in various feminist theories. I isolate two predominant conceptions presupposed by feminists: the first understands power primarily as domination, while the second views power in terms of empowerment. Although these conceptions have been criticized by feminists, critics have failed to address a crucial problem with each of them, namely, their one-sidedness. In order to make sense of the complex relations of power in which women find ourselves, an adequate feminist account will have to overcome this one-sidedness. ;A more nuanced conception must address the interests that feminists have in studying power--interests in understanding male domination, female empowerment, and feminist solidarity. Thus, it must enable us to conceive of power as power-over, power-to, and power-with. Further, it must view power from a variety of analytic perspectives: those of the particular power dyad, and of the subject-positions, cultural meanings, social practices, institutions, and structures that form the background for each dyad. ;I refine this conception by mining the theoretical resources found in Foucault's account of power. I argue that Foucault offers key insights into the relationship between power-over and power-to. Further, his account enables feminists to study power from a variety of analytic perspectives. Although his analysis provides feminists with insights for the study of power, ultimately, it is limited by its lack of an account of power-with. ;To fill in this lacuna, I turn to Arendt's account of power. Her account, which focuses on power-with, provides us with crucial insights into understanding solidarity. Further, it offers important ways of viewing power from a variety of analytic perspectives. Nevertheless, Arendt's analysis of power is also limited, particularly because of its failure to sufficiently thematize power-over. ;Each of these accounts is also limited by its lack of attention to power's structural features. I conclude by summarizing the argument of the dissertation and indicating some possible directions for a feminist analysis of power from the structural perspective.

The tension between reason and power has a long and illustrious history in political theory. In his magnum opus of legal and political theory, "Between Facts and Norms," Jürgen Habermas presents his most complex, sophisticated, and ambitious attempt to confront this tension. My thesis in this article is that though Habermas’s political theory thematizes the tension between reason and power in a way that is initially quite promising, he ultimately forecloses that tension in the direction of a rationality that has been conceptually and methodologically purified of the strategic power relations that pervade social reality. His attempt to insulate his Arendtian notion of communicative power (which he conceptualizes in BFN as a force of legitimation) from strategic power is not only unattainable in practice, I argue, but conceptually incoherent. This should compel him not to abandon his normative theoretical and political agenda, I suggest, but to defend it in a more contextualist way than he has been willing to do up until now.

In his "Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere," Habermas is notoriously and selectively blind to gender subordination – most centrally, the ways in which the bourgeois public sphere was founded upon the exclusion of women. Nancy Fraser articulated four specific assumptions involving the bourgeois public sphere that need to be recast in order to make the concept of the public sphere serviceable for feminist critical theory. However, subsequent historical, political and theoretical developments – specifically relating to globalization – have raised new questions about the constitutive exclusions and ideological distortions that inform the normative underpinnings of even this reformulated version of public sphere theory. Even if the concept of the public sphere is ideological, though, is it merely ideology?

If, as Axel Honneth has recently argued, critical theory needs psychoanalysis for meta-normative and explanatory reasons, this does not settle the question of which version of psychoanalysis critical theorists should embrace. In this paper, I argue against Honneth's favoured version – an intersubjectivist interpretation of Winnicott's object-relations theory – and in favour of an alternative based on the drive-theoretical work of Melanie Klein. Klein's work, I argue, provides critical theorists with a more realistic conception of the person and a richer explanatory account of human aggression and destructiveness than does Honneth's intersubjectivist view. As such, it better serves the ends for which Honneth claims that critical theory should turn to psychoanalysis in the first place.

This paper argues that Hannah Arendt's political theory offers key insights into the power that binds together the feminist movement - the power of solidarity. Second-wave feminist notions of solidarity were grounded in notions of shared identity; in recent years, as such conceptions of shared identity have come under attack for being exclusionary and repressive, feminists have been urged to give up the idea of solidarity altogether. However, the choice between (repressive) identity and (fragmented) non-identity is a false opposition, and the Arendtian account of solidarity developed here allows us to move beyond this opposition. Thus, Arendt provides us with a model of solidarity that can stand a post-identity politics feminist theory in good stead.

In this article, I argue for bringing the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt into dialogue with respect to the links between power, subjectivity, and agency. Although one might assume that Foucault and Arendt come from such radically different philosophical starting points that such a dialogue would be impossible, I argue that there is actually a good deal of common ground to be found between these two thinkers. Moreover, I suggest that Foucault's and Arendt's divergent views about the role that power plays in the constitution of subjectivity and agency should be seen as complementary rather than opposed.

Feminist theory needs both explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian moments in order to be truly critical and truly feminist. However, the explanatory-diagnostic task of analyzing the workings of gendered power relations in all of their depth and complexity seems to undercut the very possibility of emancipation on which the anticipatory-utopian task relies. In this paper, I take this looming paradox as an invitation to rethink our understanding of emancipation and its relation to the anticipatory-utopian dimensions of critique, asking what conception of emancipation is compatible with a complex explanatory-diagnostic analysis of contemporary gender domination as it is intertwined and entangled with race, class, sexuality, and empire. I explore this question through an analysis of two specific debates in which the paradoxical relationship between power and emancipation emerges in particularly salient and seemingly intractable forms: debates over subjection and modernity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that a negativistic conception of emancipation offers the best way for feminist critical theory to transform the paradox of power and emancipation into a productive tension that can fuel critique.

While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School--Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst--have persistently defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like? Amy Allen fractures critical theory from within by dispensing with its progressive reading of history while retaining its notion of progress as a political imperative, so eloquently defended by Adorno. Critical theory, according to Allen, is the best resouce we have for achieving emancipatory social goals. In reimagining a decolonized critical theory after the end of progress, she rescues it from oblivion and gives it a future.

In this paper, I examine Iris Marion Young's conception of power, arguing that it is incomplete in at least two ways. First, Young tends to equate the term power with the narrower notions of ‘oppression’ and ‘domination.’ Thus, Young lacks a satisfactory analysis of individual and collective empowerment. Second, as Young herself admits, it is not obvious that her analysis of power can be useful in the context of thinking about transnational justice. I conclude by considering one way in which Young's analysis of power needs to be extended or perhaps modified in order to do justice to questions of transnational justice.

Power is clearly a crucial concept for feminist theory. Insofar as feminists are interested in analyzing power, it is because they have an interest in understanding, critiquing, and ultimately challenging the multiple array of unjust power relations affecting women in contemporary Western societies, including sexism, racism, heterosexism, and class oppression. In "The Power of Feminist Theory," Amy Allen diagnoses the inadequacies of previous feminist conceptions of power, and draws on the work of a diverse group of theorists of power, including Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Hannah Arendt, in order to construct a new feminist conception of power. The conception of power developed in this book enables readers to theorize domination, resistance, and solidarity, and, perhaps more importantly, to do so in a way that illuminates the interrelatedness of these three modalities of power.

Although Judith Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender has been highly influential in feminist theory, queer theory, cultural studies, and some areas of philosophy, it has yet to receive its due from critical social theorists. This oversight is especially problematic given the crucial insights into the study of power – a central concept for critical social theory – that can be gleaned from Butler’s work. Her analysis is somewhat unique among discussions of power in its attempt to theorize simultaneously both the features of cultural domination in contemporary societies and the possibilities of resistance to and subversion of such domination. Although I will maintain here that this attempt is not entirely successful, I nevertheless argue that Butler’s account makes crucial contributions to a feminist critical theory of power; as a result, it merits much more serious attention from critical theorists.

This is an introduction to a volume of articles containing highlights from the fifty-second annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at the University of Oregon from October 24–26, 2013. All three of the plenary sessions for this conference constituted reflections on limits of various kinds: the limits of conceptual thinking, the limits of continental philosophy understood as a kind of post-Kantian quasi-transcendental enterprise, and the idea that SPEP’s guiding orientation is an openness to experience that requires the Society to push against its own limits continually, to edge beyond itself. This common thread of reflection on limits has inspired the title of this volume: "Philosophy at/of the Limit."

In a late discussion of Kant’s essay, “Was ist Aufklärung?,” Foucault credits Kant with posing “the question of his own present” and positions himself as an inheritor of this Kantian legacy.1 Foucault has high praise for the critical tradition that emerges from Kant’s historical-political reflections on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; Kant’s concern in these writings with “an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves” is, he says, characteristic of “a form of philosophy, from Hegel, through Nietzsche and Max Weber, to the Frankfurt School,” a form of philosophy in which Foucault, perhaps surprisingly, situates his own work.