Völker Heins,<i>Between Friend and Foe: The Politics of Critical Theory</i>

A book that sets out to explore the political dimension of critical theory, while covering all three generations of critical theorists, is both ambitious and welcome. As a reviewer, the question that primarily interested me concerned the approach that Volker Heins would take to the extensive corpus of critical theoretical literature – from Theodor W. Adorno through to Axel Honneth. Heins answers this question when he summarizes his approach in this way: he will treat critical theory like other narratives that revolve ‘around symbolic dichotomies’, but show that critical theory goes beyond narratives like these when it applies ‘a binary code of pure/impure, sacred/profane, to all kinds of even minuscule phenomena’ (p. 52). Referring later to the work of A. J. Greimas, Heins praises his ‘structural semantic analysis’ which reads a text in terms of ‘basic oppositional semantic structures’ (p. 132). Almost all the essays in Between Friend and Foe follow this approach of identifying oppositional semantic structures in the texts of critical theorists. The most basic of these structures is the opposition between sacred and profane, pure and polluted, mentioned above. However, problems with Heins’s approach quickly become apparent. Among other things, it involves reductive binary schemes that tend to ignore everything that does not fit into them. This approach cannot accommodate sophisticated and nuanced arguments, along with fine-grained distinctions and qualifications. Moreover, rather than evaluating the claims that critical theorists have made about the political sphere, Heins focuses exclusively on rhetoric; he never engages with the properly political dimension of critical theory but deals only with the language used to speak about politics. More problematically, his focus on semantic structures results in a disturbing detachment from the political realities described by critical theory. It perfunctorily turns firstand second-generation critical theory into a paranoid trauma narrative that has rhetorical appeal, but little or no value for understanding either the past or our current predicament. So, for example,

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