| Summary: | In this thesis I undertake a critical examination of the work Hirgen Habermas and the poststructuralist thinkers William Connolly, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe and I compare their respective notions of the 'subject' and politics. The objective of my thesis is to use the conceptual distinction between contradictions, dialectical oppositions, and paradoxes to demonstrate three central hypotheses. First, I show that Habermas's charge of 'performative contradiction' levelled against the post-structuralists' supposedly 'totalising' critiques of reason does not hold up to scrutiny, because the post-structuralists acknowledge the paradoxical nature of their ontological foundations. Second, I demonstrate that a simple dichotomy cannot be drawn between the work of Habermas and post-structuralism with him on one side as a rationalist and them on the other as 'anti-rationalists' or 'relativists'. Instead, what I elaborate in this thesis is a complex map of similarities and differences between Habermas and the post-structuralists. For example, I show that on a more straightforwardly political level Habermas shares a number of distinct similarities with the post-structuralist theorists and especially with Mouffe. Indeed, I make the case that Habermas's work cannot be reduced to a form of 'Kantian proceduralism' as it is often said to be. There are in fact distinctly 'Hegelian' elements in Habermas's conception of 'reason' and 'rationality'. Habermas's conception of rationality shares important parallels with the work of Michael Oakeshott, who is a significant influence on Mouffe. Third, I make the case that Habermas's founding principles - despite his claims to contrary - appear to be masking a paradox. I argue that paradoxes have an important place in the in the history of Western philosophy. I show that the acknowledgement of paradoxes has existed alongside the law of noncontradiction, and reconciliation since the ancient Greeks. I conclude the thesis with the suggestion that an 'agonistic' style of democracy is especially conducive to the idea of paradox because it is predicated upon the idea that there is no objective ontological truth or 'complete' identity. Finally, I suggest that it is essential to maintain the distinction between a performative contradiction, a reconciliatory logic, and a paradox, because it is potentially an injustice when a paradox is 'declared' to be resolved and beyond argumentation or contestation.
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