Habermas: Testing the Political

Abstract

International audience ; In this paper, I show how the notion of the political as an emerging reality, characterized by a fundamental indeterminacy and a propensity to produce its own borders, features in Habermas's work. The motif of the public sphere is bound with topics that all seem to attach the political to principles or authorities that precede or surpass it: the validity attributed to political statements, the weight of morality in the public sphere, and the concern to preserve science and complexity. I examine each of them in turn, in order to demonstrate how, precisely, the responses provided enable us to identify a place for the political in Ju¨rgen Habermas's philosophy. This place could be called an interstice; nevertheless, it is located at the normative level of his theory, and it is a recurring aspect of Habermas's work.