Marcia Morgan

Intersubjective Liability and Corporeal Injurability: On Communicative Freedom

This paper aims to demonstrate the inextricable connection between Habermas’s notion of ‘intersubjective liability’ and the recently developed concept of ‘corporeal injurability’, as well as their mutual impact on recent developments in Habermas’s theory of communicative freedom. In his intervention in the Historikerstreit in the 1980s, Habermas strategically embraces the extent to which the particularity of our being born-into-a-world brings with it, following Karl Jaspers’s phraseology, a historical liability. Developing his appropriation of Jaspers, Habermas seeks to balance the existential uniqueness and idiosyncrasy of one’s particular life and unrevisable historical materiality, on one hand, with the ethical requirement to position oneself in the universal, on the other hand. By emphasizing our universal relationship to ‘the other’ through the concrete and intricate discursive obligations vis-à-vis all other rational beings, Habermas provocatively advances the particularism of historical liability into universalizing ‘intersubjective liability’. But Habermas’s discourse ethics reached certain limits toward the end of the 1980s. In fact, Habermas’s work from the 1990s and later clearly indicates his ever increasing concern for and inclusion of the lived body (Leib). Furthermore, the corporeal becomes inextricably intertwined with personal integrity in his work since 2001. With the publication of Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur in 2001, the personhood in need of protection in the discourse theoretical context from the 1990s constituted by communicatively generated interpersonal relations now takes on clearly articulated biological forms. In Die Zukunft Habermas directly applies both his discourse theoretical ethics and an existential notion of freedom to the newly developed concept of corporeal injurability: The ability to choose oneself—to becomeLeibsein or a lived body subjectively— as one is—out of the constraints of Körpersein or ‘having’ a body objectively— is what manifests both our selves and our ethical-communicative normative surroundings in and through which we enact our selfhood. Taking away the freedom to relate subjectively—the being that we are in our ‘inner’ life or existential nature—to that which we are objectively—the body that we have through an ‘outer’ nature—is the problem Habermas seeks to address in this text. My paper concludes that corporeal injurability can and ought to be read back into the domain of intersubjective liability such that the two arenas of ethical subjectivity intersect. The two domains meet in a temporal point of contemporaneity as the corporeal self chooses to exist ethically with its surroundings, actively communicating the self—both physically and symbolically—as an ethical being through the everyday lived experiences of being a body [Leibsein]. The body therefore becomes the site of the lived intersection between corporeal injurability and intersubjective liability. The situatedness of intersubjective liability in the ‘now’ moment between future and past—between objectivity and subjectivity, between the universally ethical against the particular concreteness of everyday life—exposes our corporeal selves to the possible injurability of being-able-to-be-oneself [selbst-sein-können] in a state of being-with-others. It is this full image of intersubjectivity as both communicative and corporeal which viscerally awakens us to the historical materiality of our ethical nature.

Paper: Morgan – Kierkegaard and Critical Theory

Presentation date and time: 2:15-3:30pm, Sunday May 4, 2014.