Justin Evans

Indigenous peoples face a number of hurdles intaking cases to Australian law courts. In thecase that the social and economic problems canbe overcome, they face problems related to theintellectual structures of the court and thelanguage and philosophical beliefs that thecourt systems are based on. Derrida shows thatWestern metaphysics privileges speech overwriting, and this counts against indigenouscultures in which narrative knowledge is a formof writing. Due to this privileging, there is adifferend involving the courts and indigenouspeoples which makes the achievement of justicedifficult in the legal arena in Australia. Thisarticle questions whether the courts are thecorrect bodies to deal with indigenous issues.The achievement of justice is made moredifficult again by the truth-producing effectsof legal decisions, which render native titleas a weaker form of property right. Finally,indigenous Australians are caught in a catch-22situation, in which in order to receivejustice, they must Westernise their thought toadapt to the court system, and yet not allowany Westernisation of their culture. Such aWesternisation can be forced upon indigenouspeoples by the truth-producing effects oflanguage.

I suggest that we can read Marx in the light of recent analytic, neo-Hegelian thought. I summarize the Pittsburgh School philosophers’ claims about the myth of the given, the claim that human experience is conceptual all the way out, and that we live in a space of reasons. I show how Hegel has been read in those terms, and then apply that reading of Hegel to Marx’s argument that capital is akin to what Hegel called Geist, or spirit. We can understand capitalism as a space of reasons that is contradictory: while the space of reasons is supposed to make human freedom possible, our space of reasons makes freedom impossible. Reading Marx in this way is helpful, because it avoids the flaws of analytical Marxism, existentialism and structuralism. However, it raises a large problem of its own: Can the theory of the space of reasons be applied to a society that is not free of alienation? I argue that it can, but only in ways that would not satisfy the analytic neo-Hegelians themselves.

I argue that the problem of normative foundations is insoluble. I discuss how and why the apparent problem arose, particularly within the Frankfurt School. Then, I describe various theories of normative foundations and the criticisms that such theories have faced, such as ethno- and andro-centrism, imperialism, and the failure to fulfill their own aims. I make my main argument by way of an analogy: theories of knowledge have wrestled with the question of whether a “given”’ could act as a certain foundation for knowledge. The conclusion is often that no given can function in that way, because the given, which supposedly does not require justification, is therefore necessarily unable to justify knowledge. For similar reasons, I argue, nothing can function as a normative foundation for a critical social theory, because any such normative foundation would have to both stand in no need of normative justification but also justify normative social criticism. I conclude by suggesting that more recent critical theory that does not focus on normative foundations can be understood as justifying their critique by appeal to what people do actually want, rather than what they should rationally want.

Rahel Jaeggi’s theory of alienation has received less attention than her work on forms of life and capitalism. This theory avoids the problems of traditional theories of alienation: objectivism, paternalism, and essentialism. It also sidesteps post-structuralist criticisms of the theory of alienation. However, Jaeggi’s theory is flawed in two ways: it is not historically specific, and so cannot explain why alienation is a problem for modernity rather than other historical periods, and it is difficult to connect to social critique. I argue that Karl Marx’s later theory of alienation, as interpreted by Moishe Postone and others, is able to avoid the problems that Jaeggi’s theory avoids, and is also able to avoid the flaws in her theory. This suggests that critical theory should focus on a theory of capitalism rather than normative social theory.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment is at least as much a parodic critique of anti-enlightenment thought as it is a criticism of enlightenment as we know it. I begin by summing up the intellectual atmosphere in which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, noting some attempts to find other-than-enlightenment foundations for critique. Next, I discuss important interpretations of the book's attitude towards enlightenment, before describing the authors’ systematically ambiguous use of the term as both totalitarian and emancipatory. I then describe how the book uses parody to show that there can be no other-than-enlightenment ideal to set against enlightenment. All such ideals are already enlightened. This shows that consistent anti-enlightenment thinking is impossible. In that case, we can conclude that only enlightenment is not yet enlightened, in the sense that enlightened, modern society appears to us as a myth—and therefore unalterable. But, because other-than-enlightenment ideas are all already entangled with this apparently unalterable society, the only foundation for the critique of enlightenment is a properly self-critical, non-mythical enlightenment.