Abstract
I would like to begin with a question about tone. Is critique tonally inflected? Does critique speak in a critical voice? I ask because there is no avoiding it: the answer to the question ‘what is enlightenment?’ whether in Kant’s famous 1784 essay or in Freud’s psychoanalytic critique of religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), brings with it a distinctive tonal quality.1 It is as if Freud’s post-war analysis of the ‘psychical infantilism’ that is religion reproduced with exquisite accuracy the stringency of Kant’s stinging indictment of humanity’s ‘self-incurred immaturity’ in pre-revolutionary Europe. The satirical tone is, of course, not the only thing that these Enlightenment thinkers share. They also share an understanding of what lies behind this neurotic infantilism, this self-incurred immaturity, namely, pleasure.
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Notes
S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), Vol. 21, 85 (hereafter SE); Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999), Vol. 14, 443 (hereafter GW).
I. Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, in Political Writings, translated by H. B. Nisbet, edited by H. Reiss, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 54. All German references are to Kants Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Königliche Preussische (later Deutsche) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyer, 1900–), here Vol. 8, 35, translation modified (hereafter Ak).
See J. Derrida, ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, in P. Fenves (ed.), Raising the Tone of Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 117–171.
I. Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, in Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by M. J. Gregor (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–22, 17 / Ak 8, 35 (hereafter QWE).
I. Kant, ‘On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy’, in Theoretical Philosophy After 1781, edited by H. Allison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 442 / Ak 8, 402.
I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), (cf. 146) Bxxx.
Moses Mendelssohn famously called Kant the ‘all-destroyer’. M. Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden, in Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann-Holzboog Verlag, 1974), Vol. 3/2, 3.
J. Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by P.-A. Brault and M. Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 150.
H. Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 43–70.
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© 2012 Elizabeth Rottenberg
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Rottenberg, E. (2012). Psychoanalytic Critique and Beyond. In: de Boer, K., Sonderegger, R. (eds) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230357006_9
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