Abstract

Whitebook has known for years that I reject the very use of the word “modernity.” So his attempt to dissociate me from it is quite gratuitous. He also knows that I reject it for reasons that have nothing to do with a desire to return to “premodernity.” I also reject “sociology” and most of the reified jargon of the Habermas Establishment — a jargon open to the same irony Adorno deployed against the Heideggerians. This is part of my conscious endeavor to retain Marx's combative nomenclature, just as Habermas' reified jargon is part of a conscious commitment to an academically conformist one.