Giorgio Fazio

Fraser is one of the most important American philosophers and one of the leading figures of contemporary critical theory. From the 1980s to the present, Fraser has published on political philosophy and social theory, reflected upon feminism, justice, and capitalism, and has participated in public debates on current issues. The interview aims at retracing the main themes of her thought, underlining the persisting link which joins her understanding of political philosophy with social critique and public engagement. The interview also emphasizes the developments of her thought, starting from her formation in the American New Left, the encounter with feminism and the neo-Marxist cultural critique of capitalism, and the discussion of Habermas’s thought. Also discussed is Fraser’s complex feministic theory and her post-Westphalian and three-dimensional model of global justice. Another crucial topic is the recent elaboration of an enlarged view of capitalism, based on a combination of Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi, aimed at highlighting its structural crisis tendencies: not only economic, but also ecological, political, and social. The recent debate on the crisis of liberal democracy, the emergence of populism, the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the Ukrainian war, become an opportunity to test how a renewed critical theory of society can develop a social diagnosis of the time, without abandoning the task of a reconstruction of the emancipatory potential present in the existing social reality. Finally, Fraser recalls her link with the Italian philosophical tradition, stressing in particular her debt to Antonio Gramsci.

The intention of this paper is to explore the way in which Löwith′s Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen offers a contribution to the actual philosophic-moral debate about the specific moral status of personal relationships. An assumption is given in which Löwiths phenomenological analysis of the I-you-relation permits a new perspective on the question which is pointedly provoked in Honneth′s theory of recognition, namely how to deal with the tension between the universalistic issue of the Kantian morality of respect and the particular demand of care and love in personal relationships

Nell’articolo si propone un percorso finalizzato a ricostuire alcuni passaggi di particolare rilevanza teorica nella vicenda della Scuola di Francoforte, in merito al concetto di emancipazione. La tesi che si vuole verificare è che, a dispetto dell’ampio ventaglio di variazioni sul tema, sia possibile isolare alcuni tratti specifici della prospettiva “francofortese” sull’emancipazione, che si lasciano riconoscere in tutte le interpretazioni che ne sono state compiute. Nelle nuove generazioni della teoria critica si è affermata tuttavia l’esigenza di ripensare questo motivo fuori dagli schemi di filosofia della storia di matrice idealistica e marxista, nei quali veniva inizialmente interpretato. La sfida è quella di ripensare l’emancipazione come un obiettivo di prassi determinate e specifiche, ancorate a percorsi di progresso sociale non lineari, interdipendenti ma distinti e persino in contrasto.

ABSTRACT This article aims to show how the originality of Jaeggi’s contribution to recent debates in critical theory clearly emerges if one compares her approach with what in many ways represents its antecedent and constant point of reference: namely, the critical theory of Axel Honneth. This comparison offers a privileged way of grasping the advantages of Jaeggi’s approach with respect to that of Honneth. At the same time, reversing perspective, it permits us to focus on some open problems in Jaeggi’s critical theory, which deserve to be discussed with care. The negativistic, formal and procedural character of her critical theory, while on one hand shielding her approach from the risks to which the most recent theory of Honneth is exposed – historical teleologism and ethical substantialism – on the other hand exposes her approach to the risk of an excess of formalism and proceduralism, rendering it unable to tackle the central problem for any critical theory: namely, the link with a critical praxis and with the struggles for the emancipation of one’s own time.