Nadia Bou Ali at Tilburg University: Critical Apologetics: On Rainer Forst’s Noumenal Power

Monday April 28 2025 | 16:00 (Tilburg) 17:00 (Beirut) | Online

Zoom Link
Meeting ID: 870 4097 8845
Password: 2298764565

Abstract:
Rainer Forst’s theory of justification synchronizes a neo-Kantian and neo-Idealist analysis that has culminated in an undeclared synthesis of Habermas and Foucault. As we all know, the debate between Habermas and Foucault never really happened, perhaps precisely because they would have had more to agree on then not. In Forst’s work, following Habermas and Foucault, rationality and power are indissociable: the skepticism about progress aligns itself with the unstoppable progress of capitalist modernity. Communicative rationality is supplemented by a Foucauldian account of the pathologies of power. This theoretical synthesis purports that domination is only discursively resolved through the institutions of capitalist liberalism. A theory of normativity becomes a theory for the justification of powerful ideologies: violence is at the core of systems of justification and legality, we cannot disavow it, and avowing it entails a commitment to turning critique into the task of distinguishing between violence and non-violence, a violence that can be justified and a non-violence that is justifiable. The talk is concerned with the state of critical theory in this historical conjuncture. 

Speaker:
Nadia Bou Ali is Associate Professor and director of the Critical Humanities Program for the Liberal Arts at the American University of Beirut. She is the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex and Politics (Bloomsbury, 2018), Extimacy: Encounters Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (Northwestern UP, 2024), and the author of Hall of Mirrors: Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic (Edinburgh UP, 2020). She is co-editor of the book series Psychoanalytic Acts (Edinburgh UP). Her forthcoming book is entitled Structure and Form (Verso, 2026). Her works have been translated into French, Spanish, and Arabic.

The seminar will be moderated by Michiel Bot (Tilburg University)

An essay by the same title has been rececntly published on Historical Materialism’s blog.