Il discorso della critica : saggio su Jürgen Habermas

The present thesis aims at reconstructing Jürgen Habermas’ work, from its Frankfurter roots until the latest developments, in order to sketch out the epistemological framework of a critical discourse of society. Within this context, the mechanism of the intersubjective communicative praxis – which displays the basis of Habermas’ accounts of language and action, morality and law, as well as of his theories of a post-secular modernity and a post-national democracy – has to be investigated as a double-track concept. On the one hand, communication relies on a tension between a counterfactual dimension and a factual one, which opens up the possibility of calling in question (and transforming) a given normative social order. On the other hand, following an intuition of the early Habermas, communication is a mechanism reproducing power and domination structures; it has therefore to be considered as the very target of critique.