ABSTRACT
After the media-fuelled controversies which raged around the Picard and Sokal affairs, this chapter looks at the more specific and intellectually significant accusation that poststructuralism represents a betrayal of what was best about the project of Enlightenment. Here, the most powerful voice has been the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who sees poststructuralism (or what he calls neostructuralism) as undermining reason, destroying universality and renouncing the hope for emancipation. It is certainly not hard to find disparaging comments on the coercive or mystified aspects of the Enlightenment in texts by authors of a broadly poststructuralist or postmodernist persuasion. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment often lies behind such comments, as it mercilessly tracks how the advances of Enlightenment are inevitably shadowed by new forms of repression. Adorno and Horkheimer describe the Enlightenment as totalitarian; it is bound up with the mythology it claimed to repudiate; its appeal to reason is racist and imperialist.1
