The beat generation has been examined as a social movement, literary period, and political statement from many different scholarly perspectives. Through the method of rhetorical criticism I tease out an implicit theory of rhetoric from the writings of the principal beat generation founders—namely Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Offering a r…[Read more]

Most of these poems are political, but all are ironic, and all intervene in our spaces for inhabiting time. Juxtapositions rule: native/alien, organic/synthetic, tragic/silly. But in every juxtaposition, no matter how many core items it contains, is a center that holds all items in orbit, and this center never really wants to hold, for all of…[Read more]

Eine gerechte Verteilung von Gütern reicht nicht aus, um eine Gesellschaft gerecht zu machen. Gerechtigkeitstheorien müssen auch die sozialen Beziehungen in den Blick nehmen: Wirkliche soziale Gerechtigkeit herrscht erst, wenn es Institutionen gibt, die uns die Chance einräumen, soziale Anerkennung zu erfahren.

This is the introductory chapter to the monograph “Recht – Macht – Öffentlichkeit”, which investigates how to include the phenomenological dimension of the life-world in the analysis of the demoratic state. In Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of law and democracy there is reason for such an extension, yet it is hard to carry out metho…[Read more]

This working paper examines the notion of “immanent critique”, a central methodological commitment of critical theories of society. In the first part, I distinguish immanent critique – a critique which reconstructs norms immanent in a social practice which point beyond the normative self-understanding of its members – from both external and…[Read more]

Although the critique of reification is a core commitment of critical theories, there is no widely accepted account of its normative foundation. In Lukács’s original analysis, this foundation is provided by a strong concept of practice which is, however, not acceptable from a contemporary point of view. I argue that the systematic character of re…[Read more]