Amy Allen’s book The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory returns us to the core of the discontinued yet unfinished debate of the 1980ies and early 1990ies about the relationship between normativity and facticity, reason and power, critique and its normative foundations. I question Allen’s proposed conceptualization of the intertwinement of reason and power and suggest that we must unlearn the paradigm of normativity first.
The talk is part of the conference The Concept of Progress at the University of Bremen, organized by Martin Saar, Frank Nullmeier, Martin Nonhoff and Frieder Vogelmann.