SOURCE: Noys, Benjamin. “Communicative Unreason: Bataille and Habermas.” Theory, Culture, and Society 14, no. 1 (February 1997): 59-75.

In the following essay, Noys discusses Jürgen Habermas's criticism of Bataille as an originator of an “anti-modern neo-conservatism.”

How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all ‘good things’!

(Nietzsche, 1969: 62)

For Jürgen Habermas it is Georges Bataille who stands as the origin of French postmodern neo-conservatism:

To instrumental reason they juxtapose in Manichean fashion a principle only accessible through evocation, be it will to power or sovereignty, Being or the Dionysiac force of the poetical. In France this line leads from Georges Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida.

(Habermas, 1985a: 14)

The result is an anti-modernism that attempts to ‘step outside the modern world’ (Habermas, 1985a: 14) and so, objectively for Habermas, finds itself allied with a neo-conservative rejection of modernity. This initial political criticism of Bataille by Habermas, as...