Dirk Quadflieg - On the Dialectics of Reification and Freedom : From Lukács to Honneth -- and back to Hegel

Avec Dirk Quadflieg, Département de philosophie, Columbia University et la Goethe-Universtät Frankfurt am Main.

Cette conférence est présentée par le Département de philosophie de l'Université de Montréal.

Veuillez noter que la conférence sera prononcée en anglais.

Résumé : This paper deals with the question in which sense the process of reification is identical with domination and thus opposed to freedom. While this is clearly the case in Lukács’ famous essay Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, the first generation of the Frankfurt School and especially Adorno rejects such a criticism of reification as still too closely tied to a false understanding of subjective freedom. Rather, as Adorno suggests in his later works, one has to take into account that any relation to oneself is fundamentally dependent on a relation to the object. However, this insight into the dialects of subject and object, freedom and reification, gets lost in Habermas’ and Honneth’s redefinition of reification in terms of intersubjectivity. To further explain Adorno’s thesis, the paper goes back to the notion of “making oneself into a thing” (Sich-zum-Ding-Machen) developed in Hegel’s early Jena Writings, and argues that a fundamental form of reification is the condition for a specific kind of social freedom.