allen - the power of disclosure- comments on nikolas kompridis’ critique and disclosure

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DOI: 10.1177/0191453711416087

2011 37: 1025Philosophy Social Criticism Amy Allen

The power of disclosure :

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Symposium on Critique and Disclosure

The power of disclosure:Comments on NikolasKompridis’ Critique and Disclosure

Amy AllenDartmouth College, USA

AbstractThis article discusses the relationship between power and reflective disclosure in Nikolas

Kompridis’ book Critique and Disclosure. Although the concept of power is not explicitly theorized

in great detail in this book, I argue that power is highly relevant for Kompridis’ account of reflective

disclosure. I offer a few ways in which a thematization of power relations might complicate and

enrich Kompridis’ understanding of disclosure.

Keywordscritique, disclosure, power

Nikolas Kompridis’ Critique and Disclosure offers a provocative therapeutic diagnosis

of contemporary critical theory. In Kompridis’ view, the pre-eminence of the narrowly

proceduralist and demandingly universalist Habermasian version of critical theory – a

project that is, in his view, ‘strikingly out of tune’ with the pessimistic and skepticalorientation of much contemporary theory1 – has run its course. Kompridis maintains that

critical theory has entered a post-Habermasian phase, but it is not yet clear just what that

means. Does it mean, for example, that the Habermasian project can still be defended,

but only in a more pragmatic, contextualist and situated version?2 Or does critical theory

need a thicker, more Hegelian construal of the forms of ethical life that are necessary for

the concrete realization of Habermas’ normative vision?3 Or perhaps a rejection of the

Habermasian project altogether, in the name of a return to first-generation figures such

as Adorno or Benjamin, or genealogists such as Nietzsche or Foucault, or psychoanalytical

thinkers like Castoriadis, or some combination thereof? All of these options (and then

Corresponding author:

Professor Amy Allen, 6035 Thornton Hall, Hanover, NH 03755, USA

Email: [email protected]

Philosophy and Social Criticism

37(9) 1025–1031

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DOI: 10.1177/0191453711416087psc.sagepub.com








some) are on the table at the current historical juncture, and each can at the moment

plausibly claim to represent a possible future for critical theory. Critical theory is, as

Kompridis puts it, ‘as yet unclear how it is to ‘‘go on’’’.4

Central to Kompridis’ therapeutic response to this impasse is his view that criticaltheorists can only ‘go on’ by (reflectively) going back, that is, by clarifying our relation

to our own traditions. If critical theory is to have ‘a future worthy of its past’,5 then,

Kompridis argues forcefully but also subtly and eloquently, it must strive to recover a

crucial part of its own philosophical tradition: the German Romantic tradition,

represented principally by the work of Martin Heidegger. Indeed, a prominent theme

of Critique and Disclosure is our inherently ambivalent relation – both as intellectuals

and as members of a culture6 – to our traditions. Traditions both enable and constrain

our actions. We are able to attempt to transcend our traditions only as a result of capabil-

ities that have been bequeathed to us by those traditions. As Kompridis puts it, traditions

‘provide resources for, and not just obstacles to, surpassing their limitations’ (CD, pp. 7–8).

From the tradition of Heideggerian Romanticism, Kompridis strives to recover resources

for developing a new conception of critique and a more capacious conception of reason,

both of which are rethought in terms of the notion of reflective disclosure. These

resources are designed to enable critical theory to move beyond its current impasse.

At the center of this project, though by no means coextensive with it, lie Kompridis’

careful yet inventive readings of Heidegger and Habermas. Through these readings,

Kompridis seeks to engage in a process of ‘mutual correction and mutual enlargement’

(CD, p. 47) of the thought of these two figures. As I see it, Kompridis makes three key

interpretive moves. First, he strives to correct Habermas’ dismissive reading of Heideg-

ger as yet another philosopher of the subject by recovering the intersubjectivist elements

of Being and Time,7 through a reading that gives Heidegger’s notion of Mit-Dasein a

central role. In a second step, however, Kompridis sharply criticizes Heidegger for

failing to develop his intersubjectivist starting point into a ‘normatively robust concep-

tion of intersubjective accountability and recognition’ (CD, p. 48). Finally, Kompridis

draws on Heidegger’s notion of world disclosure to critique Habermas’ narrowly proce-

dural construal of reason and his assertion of the priority of validity over meaning.

Of these three interpretive moves, the second and third are likely to court the most

controversy. It is now widely agreed, by Habermas’ critics and his supporters alike, thathis interpretations of the particular thinkers he discusses in The Philosophical Discourse

of Modernity8 are flawed; correcting his reading of Heidegger is thus a relatively

straightforward task. This is not to say that correcting Habermas’ misreading of Heidegger

is not worth the effort – one could argue that certain features of Habermas’ interpretation

continue implicitly to fuel the animosity that many critical theorists feel for Heidegger,

even as that interpretation has been explicitly disavowed – it is just to say that it is not

at that level that Kompridis’ book is likely to be most controversial. Kompridis’ critique

of Heidegger will likely be more controversial, at least among Heidegger scholars, since it

turns on the claim that Heidegger’s account of Mit-Dasein in Being and Time should have pushed him to accept some normative conclusions that he either suppressed or denied.

With this claim, Kompridis wades into the complicated waters of the ethical implications

of Heidegger’s ontology.9 Heidegger’s own self-misunderstanding notwithstanding,

Kompridis maintains, ‘the recognition and acknowledgement of our dependence on our

1026 Philosophy and Social Criticism 37(9)








pre-reflective understanding of the world’ requires and is coextensive with ‘a recognition

and acknowledgement of our dependence on one another’ (CD, p. 191). In other words,

disclosure and intersubjective accountability go hand in hand.

In his critique of Habermas, Kompridis advocates not a rejection but rather anexpansion of Habermas’ conception of communicative reason, an expansion designed

to enable it to encompass without assimilating the notion of world disclosure (see CD,

p. 31). As he did with Heidegger, Kompridis chides Habermas for failing to acknowledge

the implications of some of his own best insights. Despite (or perhaps because of) the

clear connections between the concepts of world disclosure and the lifeworld, Habermas,

on Kompridis’ reading, employs three not always compatible strategies for domesticat-

ing disclosure’s inherent unruliness. In Kompridis’ view, Habermas attempts, first, to

contain world disclosure by aestheticizing it; second, to debunk it by pointing out its

skeptical implications; and/or third, to domesticate it by annexing a version of world dis-

closure into his discourse theory. This third strategy rests on the assertion of a reciprocal

interaction between meaning – which is generated by world disclosure – and validity –

which is tested through discursive argument. Central to Habermas’ version of what

Kompridis calls the ‘reciprocal interaction thesis’ is his claim that validity and argument

have priority over meaning and world disclosure (CD, p. 133). Following Heidegger,

Kompridis disputes this account of the priority relation, arguing instead for the priority

of meaning over validity, while insisting that this does not necessitate skepticism about

validity. As he puts it, ‘the asymmetry between meaning and validity is not an impedi-

ment to learning but its very condition’ (CD, p. 146). If Kompridis is right about this,

then meaning may well turn out to be something of a Trojan Horse, and Habermas’

annexation of world disclosure ends up pushing him toward a more fundamental rethinking

of his notions of discourse and reason than he seems to realize.

In light of the way that Kompridis frames the interpretive part of his project, he is sure

to draw fire both from doctrinaire Heideggerians and from doctrinaire Habermasians.

Such is, sadly, the fate of those who try to stake out the middle ground between two

entrenched theoretical camps; snipers from both sides will try to pick one off as soon

as one lifts up one’s head. Heideggerians may well resist Kompridis’ attempt to bring

Heidegger under ‘the empire of the normative’,10 while Habermasians will likely insist

either that everything Kompridis says is already accounted for in some corner of thesprawling Habermasian corpus or that he is a hopelessly Romantic anti–modern irration-

alist (or perhaps both). To my mind, both of these ways of engaging with Kompridis’

book miss what is most challenging and important about it. For Kompridis’ main aim

is not, I take it, to pit Heidegger against Habermas but instead to draw on the resources

that can be found in the work of both philosophers to develop a new model of critique,

understood as reflective disclosure. Connected to this constructive project are

Kompridis’ systematic and rich reflections on reason, agency, temporality and our com-

plex relation to our own traditions, both cultural and intellectual. It is at this level – and

not at the level of partisan bickering over the correct reading of one’s favorite German philosopher (whoever that might be) – that a book such as this one, a book that offers

contributions as substantial as they are groundbreaking, should be engaged.

In that spirit, I want to concentrate in what follows on a conceptual rather than an

interpretive issue raised by Kompridis’ study: namely, the relationship between disclosure

Allen 1027








and power. Now, at first glance, this might seem odd, since this relationship is not

something that Kompridis addresses explicitly very much in the book. Indeed, I would

argue, it could be seen as the book’s unthought. Uncovering this unthought will, I think,

frame the central problems of Kompridis’ book in a new light, and will also raise both thestakes and the degree of difficulty of his attempt to chart a new path for the future of

critical theory.

In order to get a sense of what I mean by the relationship between disclosure and

power, consider the following passage:

.. . everyday practices govern and regulate what shows up as significant and relevant in ways

that are not transparent and immediately accessible. The concern is with how everyday prac-

tices constrain what can show up as significant and relevant, how they can obstruct or mis-

lead our interpretative efforts, how they can discreetly colonize the logical space of

possibility. (CD, p. 74)

One needs only to substitute the phrase ‘relations of power’ for ‘everyday practices’ in

this passage to get a glimpse of the set of concerns that I have in mind. In putting the

point this way, I do not mean to suggest that everyday practices are nothing more than

relations of domination and subordination. I do not think that this is the case. Rather, the

worry is that everyday practices are permeated with relations of power in ways that we as

actors often do not fully understand. Some of these power relations are subordinating and

dominating and others are empowering and enabling (and, perhaps paradoxically, some may

even be both subordinating and empowering at the same time). The difficult question for critical theory, and, hence, for Kompridis’ notion of reflective disclosure, is how to ground

and justify our normative distinctions between these different types of power relations.

To be sure, Kompridis quite rightly emphasizes throughout the book the dialectic of

constraint and enablement, but he tends to talk about this dialectic in terms of the rela-

tively benign notions of everyday practices or structures of meaning and intelligibility

rather than the more worrisome category of power relations. If, by contrast, one is

inclined to worry that our everyday practices, traditions, forms of life and the like are

shot through with power relations, then the dialectic that Kompridis has in mind might

seem different and more ambivalent. For instance, in response to the worry thatdisclosure theorists must make it clear how we can assert our ‘independence’ from the

‘pre-interpreted world of meaning upon which we always already rely as a source of

intelligibility and for orientation’, Kompridis asks: ‘[M]ust we conceive our agency in

opposition to our inherited conditions of intelligibility? Would it not be worth our while

to find another way to transform their limitations and constraints, a ‘‘transcendence’’ that

draws generously upon, rather than completely opposes, the sources of intelligibility and

meaning?’ (CD, p. 132). Now, if the issue is framed, as it is here, solely in terms of the

sources of meaning and intelligibility, then the answers to these questions seem obvi-

ously ‘no’ and ‘yes’. If, however, we consider the possibility that our notions of meaning

and intelligibility are themselves bound up with power–knowledge relations, then these

questions should, I think, give us more pause.

I suspect, by the way, that it is something like this worry about the relationship

between power and the disclosure of meaning that prompts Habermas to insist on the

1028 Philosophy and Social Criticism 37(9)








priority of validity over meaning. In other words, from Habermas’ point of view, it is not

meaning per se that is the problem, it is the power relations that may well be lurking in

the background, structuring our forms of life, everyday practices, and systems of

meaning and intelligibility behind our backs and over our heads. The suggestion that power relations could serve as prior, enabling/constraining conditions for practices of

discursive justification would no doubt strike Habermas as dangerous indeed. A similar

point could be made about Kompridis’ conception of reason. Kompridis helpfully

conceptualizes reason not as something that transcends us, but instead as that which

we are. I take this to mean that reason inheres in and is coextensive with our practices.

As Kompridis sees it, discursive argumentation is one such practice of reason, but so is

the disclosure of possibilities (CD, p. 238). He writes: ‘[W]hat we should be aiming for is

a conception of reason that preserves its change-initiating power at the same time as it

accommodates (rather than denies) its dependence on history, culture, and language –

on semantic and cultural resources not of its own making and not at its disposal’ (CD,

p. 241). I wholeheartedly agree with this claim, but once again, power can be seen

lurking in the shadows, just out of sight. If history, culture and language are shot through

with relations of power – and who could deny that they are? – then this claim leaves us

but a short step from asserting reason’s dependence on power relations.

Now, the fact that these suggestions are dangerous does not mean that they are wrong,

nor am I suggesting as much. To the contrary, I am quite sympathetic with Kompridis’

claims about the priority of meaning over validity and with his attempt to develop a more

capacious and less transcendent conception of reason. But I found myself wishing that

Kompridis had gone one step further here and owned up to the danger inherent in these

moves, by acknowledging that claims about the priority of meaning over validity and

about the inherence of reason in history and human practices open the door to – at the

very least – the hopeless entanglement of power, validity and reason.

This worry about the entanglement of reason, validity and power, in turn, leads me to

some questions about Kompridis’ notion of critique. Kompridis argues that the familiar

problem of critical distance – namely, the question of how we are capable of taking up a

critical, reflective stance on the practices, traditions, cultural meanings that shape our

identities, practices, institutions, forms of life, even our language – is a red herring.

Such a dis-stantiating stance is, for Kompridis, simply not possible. Critical ‘distance’can be achieved only through what Kompridis calls critical intimacy. As appealing as

his account of critical intimacy is, I suspect that part of its appeal rests on the fact that

the background with which we are encouraged to be intimate is characterized as a set of

traditions, sources of meaning and intelligibility, everyday practices, and the like. If we

were to think of the background instead as a set of complex and multifarious relations of

power, some of which subordinate, alienate, or oppress us, then the notion of critical

intimacy sounds a lot less appealing.11 For example, consider the relations of gender

subordination that are intertwined with our religious, cultural and familial traditions, that

continue to thrive in our everyday practices despite our best efforts to critique and trans-form them, and that serve as conditions of meaning intelligibility for competent language

speakers. Kompridis is right that these traditions, sources of meaning and practices

enable gendered agents even as they constrain us; I would go even further here and say

that they could be seen to empower gendered agents even as they subordinate us. But the

Allen 1029








Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992); Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions: On Decon-

struction and Reconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1991); and David Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (London: Blackwell, 1994),

chs 1–3. Unlike Kompridis, I am sympathetic to this approach, for reasons I discuss in AmyAllen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy and Gender in Contemporary Critical

Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

3. This path is explored in rich detail in the work of Axel Honneth, in particular his The Struggle

for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. J. Anderson (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1995); with Nancy Fraser, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-

Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003); and Disrespect: The Normative Foundations

of Critical Theory, trans. J. Ganahl (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

4. Kompridis, ‘Rethinking Critical Theory’, 299.

5. Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory Between Past and Future

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. xi; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CD.

6. On the relationship between cultures and their traditions, see Nikolas Kompridis, ‘Normativiz-

ing Hybridity/Neutralizing Culture’, Political Theory 33(3) (2005): 318–43.

7. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996).

8. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F. G.

Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).

9. For helpful discussion of these issues, see Lawrence Vogel, The Fragile We: Ethical Implica-

tions of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994).

10. To borrow Robyn Marasco’s evocative phrase.

11. One could make a similar point about Kompridis’ analysis of receptivity. Receptivity to one’s

cultural traditions, their sources of meaning and intelligibility, their semantic resources, and so

on, sounds pretty appealing; receptivity to their ideological justifications of entrenched

relations of dominance and subordination, not so much.

12. On this point, see Linda Zerilli, ‘Doing without Knowing: Feminism’s Politics of the

Ordinary’, Political Theory 26 (1998): 435–58.

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