The Decline

Il faut être absolument moderne. - Rimbaud , Un Saison en Enfer Long Sunday has dusted itself off for a series of essays on Axel Honneth 's new collection of essays : Pathologies of Reason . Unfortunately, I have not read the book. But many of the essays have been published previously in English, collected now under the rubric of the "legacy of Critical Theory." What I intend to do here is not to review the book, but to reflect on a few issues illustrated by the symposium at Long Sunday. I comment at considerable distance from the text itself: a response to responses at Long Sunday to an edited volume of essays translated from German. What Honneth really says is thus not an issue for me. This fact however points our attention towards a truism: that 'Critical Theory'—here more narrowly construed than in Craig McFarlane 's contribution—is a discourse sustained by readers and commenters. There is not only a set of primary texts that form the foundatio...