File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0304, message 56


From: HealantHenry-AT-aol.com
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 09:10:21 EST
Subject: Re: Truth as propaganda


Crifasi, 
if i appear to be polemical with you, it is in a very shoddy sense because i 
can't take you seriously.  you appear like a drunken bar room brawler daring 
patrons out into the street.  i am simply an anonymous face in the crowd who 
on occasion (when he does not delete your messages unopenned) hurls an insult 
and hides in the crowd.

If this (rather lengthy for this list) piece of Foucault is conjured up in 
your mind as yet another polemical discourse then please just consider it 
again a jibe hurled from the anonymity of the crowd, judge me a coward in 
your warriorly Befindlichkeit, and i'll be happy to continue secretly being a 
fool.

if, however, you'd like to discuss it, i'd be happy to share my foolishness 
with you.
peace,
hen


(May, 1984)
Paul Rabinow:  Why is it that you don't engage in polemics?

Michel Foucault:  I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to 
answer them.  It's true that i don't like to get involved in polemics.  If I 
open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of "infantile 
leftism," I shut it again right away.  That's not my way of doing things; I 
don't belong to the world of people doing things that way.  I insist on this 
difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the morality 
that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.

In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal 
elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the 
discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the 
questions is merely exercising the right that has been given to him: to 
remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, 
to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on.  
As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does 
not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is 
tied to the questioning of the other. Questions and answers depend on a game 
- a game that is at once pleasant and difficult - in which each of the two 
partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the 
accepted form of the dialogue.

The polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in priviledges that he 
possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he 
possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just 
undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for truth 
but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very 
existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game consists not of 
recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of 
abolishing him, as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final 
objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but 
to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding 
from the beginning.  The polemicist relies on the legitimacy that his 
adversary is by definition denied.

Perhaps, someday, a long history will have to be written of polemics, 
polemics as parasitic figure on discussion and an obstacle to the search for 
the truth. Very schematically, it seems to me that today we can recognize the 
presence in polemics of three models: the religious model, the judiciary 
model, and the political model. As in heresiology, polemics sets itself the 
task of determing the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and 
necessary principle that the adversary has neglected, ignored, or 
transgressed; and it denounces this neglect as a moral failing; at the root 
of the error, it finds passion, desire, interest, a whole series of 
weaknesses and inadmissible attachments that establish it as culpable.  As in 
the judiciary preactice, polemics allows for no possibility of an equal 
discussion: it examines a case; it isn't dealing with an interlocutor, it is 
processing a suspect; it collects the proofs of his guilt, designates the 
infraction he has committed, and pronounces the verdict and sentences him. In 
any case, what we have here is not on the order of a shared investigation; 
the polemicist tells the truth in the form of his judgement and by the virtue 
of the authority he has conferred on himself. But it is the political model 
that is the most powerful today. Polemics defines alliances, recruits 
partisans, unites interests or opinions, represents a party; it establishes 
the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests against which one 
must fight until the moment the enemy is defeated and either surrenders or 
disappears.

Of course the reactivation, in polemics, of these political, judiciary, or 
religious practices is nothing more than theatre. One gesticulates: 
anathemas, excommunications, condemnations, battles, victories, and defeats 
are no more than ways of speaking, after all. And yet, in the order of 
discourse, they are also ways of acting which are not without consequence. 
There are the sterlizing effects.  Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out 
of a polemic? And how could it be otherwise, given that here the 
interlocutors are incited not to advance, not to take more and more risks in 
what they say, but to fall back comtinually on the rights they claim, on 
their legitimacy, which they must defend, and on the affirmation of their 
innocence?  There is something even more serious here: in this comedy, one 
mimics war, battles, annihiliations, or unconditional surrenders, putting 
forward as much of one's killer's instinct as possible. But it is really 
dangerous to make anyone believe that he can gain access to the truth by such 
paths and thus to validate, even if in a merely symbolic form, the real 
political practices that could be warranted by it. Let us imagine for a 
moment, that a magic wand is waved and one of the two adversaries in a 
polemic is given the ability to exercise all the power he likes over the 
other. One doesn't even have to imagine it: one has only to look at what 
happened during the debates in the USSR over linguistics or genetics not long 
ago. Were these merely aberrant deviations from what was supposed to be the 
correct discussion? Not at all--they weere the real consequences of a polemic 
attitude whose effects ordinarily remain suspended.

Essential Foucault, Vol one: ethics/subjectivity and truth, pp 111-113


     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005