Hent de Vries and the Other of Reason

Abstract

The Dutch philosopher of religion Hent de Vries has explored and complicated the boundaries between religion and modern thought in order to create the space for an innovative “minimal theology.” This article reconstructs de Vries's interpretation of the changes in Theodor W. Adorno's thought between Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics in order to demonstrate its fecundity for a philosophical account of otherness. It also examines and defends de Vries's own rhetorical mode of reading texts as an exemplary approach to philosophical dialogue. Finally, however, the essay challenges de Vries's privileging of the religious as the site of ethical relationality and his intentional bracketing of Adorno's critical social theory.

Notes

Notes

1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), xviii, hereafter abbreviated as DE and cited in the text.

2. See for example Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Back to Adorno,” in Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 30–31.

3. Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), hereafter abbreviated as MT and cited in the text; Theologie im pianissimo: Zur Aktualität der Denkfiguren Adornos und Levinas (Kampen, Neth.: J. H. Kok, 1989). He describes the new translation as his “first and last word” (xxx) in a trilogy of books on religion that also includes Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), and Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). He is also the general editor of a projected five-volume collaborative project entitled “The Future of the Religious Past,” funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO); to date the first volume has been published as Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

4. See de Vries, MT, 239n. Hullot-Kentor rejects this attribution as a deliberate manipulation by Habermas to render the book self-defeating and obsolete: “By ascribing the heart of the book to Horkheimer and then showing that the book itself is an aberration in the life of a once reasonable man, Habermas can arrange for Horkheimer to disown the work in reason's name.” Hullot-Kentor, “Back to Adorno,” 30.

5. Martin Jay, “The Debate over Performative Contradiction: Habermas versus the Poststructuralists,” in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993), 25.

6. Jürgen Habermas, “A Philosophico-Political Profile,” in Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity, ed. Peter Dews (London; Verso, 1986), 155; Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 119. Both are quoted in Jay, “The Debate over Performative Contradiction,” 27.

7. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 246.

8. Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 144. Quoted in MT, 20.

9. See the footnote on p. 55: “The metaphor of the ‘bisection’ of rationality is borrowed from Habermas's contribution to the … ‘positivist dispute,’” in which the early Habermas criticized positivism's separation of knowledge from its inherent tendency toward human emancipation. See also Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).

10. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5.

11. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, ed. R. zur Lippe, 2 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 2:168. Quoted in de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 143.

12. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 229 (de Vries's emphasis).

13. Ibid., 375.

14. Ibid., 193.

15. Peter Gilgen, “The Deconversion of Hent de Vries,” Journal for Religious and Cultural Theory 7.1 (Winter 2005): 98.

16. Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 14–15. For a comparable use of this figure of thought in contemporary critical theory, see Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

17. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 375.

18. Hent de Vries, “Introduction: Why Still ‘Religion’?,” in de Vries, Religion: Beyond a Concept, 27. As Gilgen also notes, “In spite of its etymology that stresses its inherent connectivity, religion, then, will have been a divisive power first and foremost.” Gilgen, “The Deconversion of Hent de Vries,” 84.

19. De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 5.

20. De Vries, “Preface,” in de Vries, Religion: Beyond a Concept, xiii.

21. Gilgen, “The Deconversion of Hent de Vries,” 96.

22. De Vries, Religion and Violence, xiv.

23. Ibid., 196; italics in original.

24. De Vries cites the historian Eric Hobsbawm's famous description of the short twentieth century. De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 20.

25. De Vries, Religion and Violence, 1.

26. Martin Jay, “The Paradoxes of Religious Violence,” in Refractions of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2003), 182.

27. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365.

28. Ibid., 228.

29. See for instance the essays and public radio addresses collected in Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickfort, intro. Lydia Goehr (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). For a recent account of Adorno's activities and goals after his return from exile in America, see Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).

30. As Foucault famously noted in an interview with Gérard Raulet, “if I had been familiar with the Frankfurt School, if I had been aware of it at the time, I would not have said a number of stupid things I did say, and I would have avoided many of the detours I made while trying to pursue my own humble path.” Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Post-structuralism,” in James D. Faubion, ed., The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume Two: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press), 433–58, 440.

31. See for example Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

32. De Vries's former colleague Harry Kunneman pursued this theme extensively in an influential Dutch-language study that is discussed in Minimal Theologies. Harry Kunneman, De waarheidstrechter: Een communicatietheoretisch perspectief op wetenschap en samenleving (Amsterdam: Boom, 1986).

33. Rolf Tiedemann, “Concept, Image, Name,” trans. Ellen Anderson and Tom Huhn, in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 141.