ABSTRACT
This chapter lays out the historical, literary, and theoretical contexts for In Defense of Dialogue and suggests an alternative to the prevailing literary–theoretical pairings of postwar periodization: Theodor Adorno and late modernists on the one hand, and French post-structuralists and high postmodernists on the other. These two camps have in common their attack on enlightenment rationality, and with it, on subjects capable of intentional speech acts and good faith communication. Habermas likewise critiques the Cartesian model of subjectivity but argues that we become critically self-reflective subjects by communicating with other speakers. This chapter also examines how Habermas relates subjective authority to pronoun use, based on his reading of social theorist George Herbert Mead, who argues that “I,” “me,” and “you” designate the relative agency of the subjects to whom they are affixed. Finally, this chapter reviews Habermas’ early declinist account of the public sphere, contrasting it with the shared, embedded context of the lifeworld where face-to-face dialogue compels subjects to speak with greater self-awareness due to their spatial proximity. Most importantly, this introductory chapter clarifies the limits of Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which never claims that ideal speech act scenarios are possible, but rather that even the most oppositional co-interlocutors desire and can thus be guided by their pursuit of mutual recognition.
