ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the compatibility or otherwise of the standpoints of desire and communicative rationality. Rationality is a concept primarily applicable to agents, whether individual or collective. Clearly, in Habermas's case, such a theory is being developed through the interanimation of the ideas of communicative rationality and those of moral identity. The radical projects of both the poststructuralist theory of desire and Habermas's communicative rationality would be strengthened if the advice of G. A. Cohen were to be followed. There are many definitions of the modern and of the postmodern, but one quite conventional usage is the one adopted by both Barthes and Foucault, which differs little from the definition of aesthetic modernism found in many standard texts. A concern for some sense of balance between the historic-theoretical and the sensual-aesthetic led Habermas to make rather peremptory remarks about young conservatives.
