The moral grammar of critical theory Rethinking Injustice from Habermas back to Adorn

Jurgen Habermas raised the important challenge that any social critique must provide an explicit account of its normative foundations. This was given an important turn by a series of contemporary critical theorists---Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, and Rainer Forst---who address it not via the concept of justice but rather that of injustice. All share the important insight that injustice means structural wrongdoing: a morally wrong form of social interdependence. Ultimately, however, their ideas of injustice and critique rely on an incoherent "normative depth grammar," which they in fact share with Habermas. Injustice is construed as the violation, mis-application, or distortion of some ideal of justice; and the demand for justice is understood as the demand to restore this ideal to some originary, complete state. Intuitive though it seems, this is problematic in two fundamental respects. It relies on a formal notion of wrongdoing that says nothing about the content of social interdependence. Second, it fails to address situations that constitute not a mis-application of an ideal but a challenge to its very meaning: new forms of harmful interdependence for which we do not possess a yardstick. Turning to the work of Theodor W. Adorno, this problem of "normativism" is traced back to Kant's moral theory. At stake is the theory of meaning behind ideal terms like "humanity" and "dignity," and its replacement with a negative historical-materialist one. The latter lives up to the above betrayed intuition: it is concepts of injustice---exclusion, exploitation, inequality, coercion etc.---that give content to ideals of justice, by serving as encodings of concrete forms of social injury. This gives rise to what is referred to a "negative" grammar of critique, whose referent is not the violation of ideal concepts of justice, but material social processes whereby new forms of injury emerge that those concepts do not cover. To demand justice is not to demand to restore the original meaning of ideals, but to re-signify them so as to address such material incompatibilities. The result is a fundamental turn from the question of the normativity of critique to the critique of normativity.