A Distilled Cry for Reason: A Messy Eulogy for Jürgen Habermas
May 18, 2026
By Lucas Alan Dietsche, Cohort '23
“… all language is a distilled cry for water…
like bulleted-star beams, into tubes, shatter ..” marks. (Dietsche, lines 4)
The unpublished stanza marks a site where philosophy is not merely argued but lived, as though it becomes tension, unfolding in a manner reminiscent of Jürgen Habermas’s restless movement between reason and critique. In 2003, my curiosity found Habermas’s book The Inclusion of the Other, and I remember feeling both challenged and unsettled (Habermas 56). People like Habermas are contrapuntal, their thoughts spiraling across history, reason, and ethics in ways refusing simple closure. Encountering his text was like stepping into a conversation already in motion, one stretching across generations, debates, and disciplines.
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2026/03/living-in-a-critical-condition-jurgen-habermas-at-90
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who died on March 14, 2026, at the age of 93, was like Martin Heidegger when he died: a clear, wise hawk, fully aware of his energetic powers. His trajectory is inseparable from the intellectual journey formed under the shadow of Theodor W. Adorno, having known Max Horkheimer personally, witnessing the fissures leading to his divergence from Herbert Marcuse and the broader trajectory of Frankfurt thought. Debates with Hans-Georg Gadamer over hermeneutics revealed Habermas’s insistence that understanding alone cannot secure justice; disputes with Michel Foucault explored the limits of power and knowledge; and exchanges with Jacques Derrida tested the boundaries of deconstruction against the imperatives of communicative reason. Across these encounters, one question persisted: should we give up the Enlightenment? (Habermas, “Modernity” 125). Habermas never gave a simple answer, but his lifelong commitment suggests a resolute, if cautious, affirmation-as defense of reason not as triumphalist certainty, but as a collective, deliberative practice.
Reading Habermas again, he and I diverge regarding aesthetics. He rejected avant-garde approaches, favoring art as communicable, a medium whose value lies in fostering shared understanding (Habermas “Modernity” 156). My neo-Dadaist and Getzner-inspired approach to poetry resists translation and especially through a Gallantian post-reality inflecting sensibility embracing rupture as something communicative reason would resist in its orientation toward mutual intelligibility (Gallant & Dietsche 20251). On the contrary, to read Jürgen Habermas is to inhabit a space of dialogue across generations. For those of us who encountered him through the written word, through his debates, and through the resonances of the Frankfurt tradition, his passing is both a loss and an invitation. The conversation must be carried forward as the question of reason is in a world where it is always, and necessarily, contested.
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1 “Getzner” as an amalgam for Gedichtzerstörer or Poetry Destroyer in German. “Getzner” is a rear-guard, anti-poetry, surrealist, and neo-dadaist movement in the 2020’s seeking to reclaim mysticism and concealment as a revolt against contemporary spoken word and confessionalism. For more information go to Gallant, Justin and Dietsche, Lucas Alan, “Words About Lighting a Cigar and Spitting Veganisms: Or, It Stages Two Modalities of Movement—Bloch/Dietsche Walks Toward the Not-Yet (Hope, Futurity, Dichtergang), While Benjamin/Gallant Walks Within the Already-Haunted (Memory, Ruin, Unfolding).” 24 Nov. 2025 or https://www.youtube.com/@getznerpoetics
“Gallantian post-reality” refers to a paper defining “post-reality” as an aesthetic condition shaped by global crises, technological acceleration, and the collapse of stable meaning, and situates it through theorists such as Baudrillard, Hayles, Bratton, Mbembe, Tsing, Steyerl, and Bishop to map its conceptual and political dimensions.
For more information check out :Gallant, Justin. Aesthetics of Post-Reality. Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/127369456/Aesthetics_of_post_reality. Accessed 16 Apr. 2026.
Works Cited
Dietsche, Lucas Alan. Unpublished poem. 2026.
Gallant, Justin and Dietsche, Lucas Alan, “Words About Lighting a Cigar and Spitting Veganisms: Or, It Stages Two Modalities of Movement—Bloch/Dietsche Walks Toward the Not-Yet (Hope, Futurity, Dichtergang), While Benjamin/Gallant Walks Within the Already-Haunted (Memory, Ruin, Unfolding).” 24 Nov. 2025. https://www.youtube.com/@getznerpoetics
Habermas, Jürgen. The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. MIT Press, 1998.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity: An Incomplete Project.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, Bay Press, 1983, pp. 3–15.