Lyotard rejects Habermas’s consensus ideal as totalizing and terrorist

Evidence

Habermas’s vision of an evolutionary social leap into a new type of rational society, defined in communicational terms as “the communication community of those affected, who as participants in a practical discourse test the validity claims of norms and, to the extent that they accept them with reasons, arrive at the conviction that in the given circumstances the proposed norms are ‘right,’ ” is here explicitly rejected by Lyotard as the unacceptable remnant of a “totalizing” philosophical tradition and as the valorization of conformist, when not “terrorist,” ideals of consensus. — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 38

Categorization

• XREF: The sharp Lyotard-vs-Habermas disagreement on consensus is precisely the contrast Jameson engages. — connects to: The canonical Lyotard-Habermas debate originated from mutual ignorance of each other’s work. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 83; Lyotard’s anti-totality stance stems from a French post-Marxist reaction — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 36; Habermas rejected the notion that technocratic rationalization is unstoppable and self-justifying. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2697