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PASSERIN D'ENTRTVES, Maurizio, and BENHABIB, Seyla, eds. Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1997. 305 pp. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $17.00-This collection of ten essays "by a team of leading philosophers, social scientists, intellectual historians and literary critics" (p. 2) aims to critically engage Jurgen Habermas's critique of postmodernism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 1987). Five of the essays have been previously published, and Habermas's essay, "Modernity: An Unfinished Project," is also reprinted here. The book also contains a very helpful introduction by Passerin d'Entreves, and an index.
Among Habermas's criticisms of postmodernism, we find two powerful and familiar points, which apply especially to the thought of Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard. First, on one reading, postmodernist thought reduces all meaning and truth to the "free play" of signification, and therefore plunges us into a kind of irrational chaos. This epistemological relativism also inevitably leads to the collapse of the distinction between philosophy and literature, a distinction which Habermas wishes to retain. Second, on another reading, perhaps these thinkers are subtly introducing their own theory of truth (or set of metaphysical claims) and are thereby contradicting themselves, because (officially) each is opposed to "oppressive, monological reason. . . the...