Axel Honneth: The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (1985/1991)

Axel Honneth’s Critique of Power is a rich interpretation of the history of critical theory, which clarifies its central problems and emphasizes the “social” factors that should provide that theory with a normative and practical orientation.

Honneth focuses on the dialog between French and German social theory that was beginning at the time of Michel Foucault’s death. It traces the common roots of the work of Foucault and Jürgen Habermas to a basic text of the last generation of critical theorists – Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment – and draws from this connection the outline of a program that might unite and surpass their seemingly irreconcilable methods of critiquing power structures. In doing so, Honneth provides a constructive and nonpolemical framework for comparisons between the two theorists. And he presents a novel interpretation of Foucault’s analysis of social systems.

Honneth traces the internal contradictions in critical theory through an analysis of Horkheimer’s early programmatic writings, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Adorno’s later social-theoretical writings. He shows how Habermas and Foucault in their distinctive ways reinserted the social world into critical theory but argues that neither operation has been wholly successful. His cogent analysis redirects critical social theory in ways that can draw on the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of the two approaches.

Originally published in German under the title Kritik der Macht. Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1985
Translated by Kenneth Baynes
Publisher MIT Press, 1991
Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought series
ISBN 0262581280, 9780262581288
372 pages

review (Elaine Martin)

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Raoul Vaneigem: The Revolution Of Everyday Life (1967–) [FR, ES, EN]

“The book was, along with Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, one of the most significant works written by members of the Situationist International (1957–1972).

The book takes the field of ‘everyday life’ as the ground upon which communication and participation can occur, or, as is more commonly the case, be perverted and abstracted into pseudo-forms. The author considers that direct, unmediated communication between ‘qualitative subjects’ is the ‘end’ to which human history tends – a state of affairs still frustrated by the perpetuation of capitalist modes of relation and to be “called forward” through the construction of situations. Under these prevailing conditions, people are still manipulated as docile ‘objects’ and without the ‘qualititive richness’ which comes from asserting their irreducible individuality – it is toward creating life lived in the first person that situations must be ‘built’. So to speak, it is the humiliation of being but a ‘thing’ for others that is responsible for all the ills Vaneigem equates with modern city life – isolation, humiliation, mis-communication – and toward creating new roles that flout stereotyped convention that freedom comes.” (Wikipedia)

French edition
Publisher Gallimard, 1967.
Vaneigem’s preface to the first French paperback edition was published by Gallimard in 1992.

English translation was first published in 1983 jointly by Left Bank Books and Rebel Press.
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Publisher Rebel Press, 2001
No copyright claims will be made against publishers of non-profit editions.
ISBN 0946061017, 9780946061013
279 pages

Review: Libero Andreotti (J Architectural Education, 1996).

Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (French, 1967, unpaginated), HTML
Tratado del saber vivir para uso de las jovenes generaciones (Spanish, trans. Javier Urcanibia, 1977/2008)
The Revolution Of Everyday Life (English, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1983/2001)

Tanja Ostojić: Strategies of Success / Curators Series, 2001-2003 (2004) [English/Serbian/French]

“Tanja Ostojić is an interdisciplinary artist from Belgrade who lives and works in Berlin. In her provocative performances, she investigates the position of women within contemporary cultural and political power regimes. She uses persiflage, provocation and irony as strategies to expose and subvert the exclusionary mechanisms of European immigration policies and the hierarchies within the Western art world.

In the years 2001 to 2003, Tanja Ostojić worked on the series Strategies of Success / Curator Series, which consists of performances, installations, photographs and a journal. In I’ll Be Your Angel (2001) she accompanied the curator Harald Szeemann during the opening of the 49th Venice Biennale, never leaving his side. She “presented” her conceptual body art work Black Square on White (2001), in which her pubic hair was trimmed in a square, by keeping it hidden. Tanja Ostojić’s other public actions include taking a bubble bath with the Italian curator Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and art critic Ludovico Pratesi in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome as the lovely ending to a shared gala dinner, and washing the feet of the Belgrade-based curator Stevan Vuković in Sofa for Curator (2002). The only traces of the non-public performance with the Albanian curator Edi Muka, Vacation with Curator (2003), are the photographs taken by the paparazzi she hired. In her work Politics of queer curatorial positions: After Rosa von Praunheim, Fassbinder and Bridge Markland (2003) she and the Slovenian curator and theorist Marina Gržinić re-enact an iconographic scene featuring Gabrielle d’Estrées, mistress to King Henry IV of France, and one of her sisters.” source

With texts by Marina Gržinić, Suzana Milevska, Tanja Ostojić.

Publisher Galérie La Box, Paris, with Student Cultural Center, Belgrade, 2004
Translations by Laurence Chamlou, Danielle Charonnet, Dušan Djordjević Mileusnić
ISBN 2910164322, 9782910164324
144 pages

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