Justice and drama on Bakhtin as a complement to Habermas巴赫金的正义和戏剧是对哈贝马斯的补充.pdfVIP

Justice and drama: on Bakhtin as a complement to Habermas Ken Hirschkop Introduction: suspicion of the public sphere The most surprising moment in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms is surely when, discussing the differentiation of public spheres in modern societies, Habermas uses as an example the ‘occasional or arranged publics of particular presentations and events such as theatre performances, rock concerts. . .’ (Habermas 1996: 374). Rock concerts? Habermas? I’m sure many people’s first reaction, however trivial or foolish, was to wonder whether Professor Habermas had ever been to a rock concert. But Habermas’ choice of examples and the incongruity of the choice aren’t accidental: they tell us something interesting about the reception the concept of the public sphere has had in the English- speaking world and about the pressure Habermas has been under since the translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English in 1989. Volumes like the present one testify to the ambiguous impact of Habermas’ book in the 1990s, which has been welcomed, but also treated with a certain degree of suspicion. Just as there are romances which never happen because the right people meet at the wrong time, so there are books which arrive too early or too late on the scene to have the impact they should have. When Habermas first published The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962, he didn’t have cultural studies in mind. His argument that the ‘public use of reason’, first institution- alized in eighteenth-century Britain and France, changed the very basis of legitimacy and state rule, had two obvious targets. On the one hand, Habermas knew that the social welfare state that had emerged after the Second World War was the breeding ground for