Bounds of Reason: Habermas, Lyotard and Melanie Klein on Rationality

In The Bounds of Reason: Habermas, Lyotard and Melanie Klein on Rationality Emilia Steuerman explores the limits and meaning of rationality as a tool for understanding truth, justice and freedom. She presents the current controversy between modernism and postmodernism in a rigorous yet accessible analysis of the debate between Jurgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard. Steuerman clearly highlights the problems encountered both by a defence of reason and the lack of meaning which haunts a world without reason. Her goal is to ascertain whether reason can be used as a weapon of domination or as a means of emancipation, and she investigates the limits of both the rationalist and irrationalist projects by introducing the work of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. Klein’s theory of object-relations paves the way for an understanding of the ethical and emotional bounds which hold individuals in contact with the outside world and secure our capacity for rational thought. Steuerman demonstrates how Melanie Klein’s theory sheds new light onto Habermas’s modernist concepts of intersubjectivity and communities of shared language users whilst also taking into account the irrational and primitive worlds of love and hatred which colour our perceptions of ourselves and others.