A Vitalist Turn in the Last Generation of Critical Theory?

The ‘third’ and the ‘fourth’ generation of the Frankfurt School – Axel Honneth and his student Rahel Jaeggi – tried to redirect critical theory out of the ‘ice- desert of abstraction’ (Adorno) back to a possible concept of ‘good life’. Drawing from – and renewing – Honneth’s analysis of the social pathologies of recognition, Rahel Jaeggi attempts to elaborate a Critique of forms of life (Jaeggi, 2018). Jaeggi is convinced that Habermas’ exclusive attention to the question of ethics and normativism has produced an analytic neutralisation toward any form of individual life and all its potential emancipative properties. Within this conceptual frame the critique of form of life is not conducted from an external authoritarian perspective, but from an immanent perspective. Like Georg Simmel taught us in his major Sociology (2009), we should consider the forms of social life as arising from the reciprocal relations of intentional individual actions. In every form there is an ‘immanent transcendence’, strictly connected to the process of life: the dialectics of ‘more life’ – the immanent side of life – and ‘more-than-life’ – the transcendent one. These are two complementary aspects of life within a dialectical scheme which is open and tragic, since it never ends, and has no final synthesis. Even if Jaeggi seems to disempower Simmel’s possible contribution to an immanent critique of forms due to her pragmatist approach in terms of a ‘problem-solving’ attitude towards life – life is viewed as a process of accumulated experiences that does not know ‘springs’ or ‘new beginnings’ – at the same time her form of criticism intends to be immanent and transformative: it is immanent because it starts from the immanent crisis of social practices and institutions; it is transformative, as it allows for a transcendence of context.