Rosalba Mallardo

Modernity is stuck between the potential of its emancipatory spirit and the difficulty of implementing it. This impasse has generated the need to look for a feasible form of critique that is capable of grounding reason in order to revitalize the modern project of emancipation. In this aim, the dominant strategies, intend to provide reason with a way to mediate its own comprehension:radical critique. In this regard, I evaluate Habermas’ and Taylor’s work for they are two paradigmatic and opposing examples of that strategy. I come back to them because there are still generations of thinkers that use, or can be recognized as using, the philosophical instruments shaped by them. However those instruments are structurally faulty as I demonstrate, from new perspectives, in Chapters I and II, respectively. Their failures, I argue, either open up the way to an idle repetition of the same mistakes or, push us to look for an alternative approach to the modern project of emaciation as there is still the need of it. Against the impracticable option of using ill-suited tools, without having explored alternative approaches, I investigate what I take to be a re-conceptualization of the modern project of emancipation. Through Foucault’s work, with the Chapter III, I explore and then defend a project that I reckon as capable to both explain why radical critique fails, and open up a feasible new path for emancipation.