From: "Anthony Crifasi" <crifasi-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Truth as propaganda
Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 14:44:00 +0000


Henry wrote:

>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.

And which of these appears to you to be an un-serious, drunken reason for 
the Iraq war:

1. Hussein's violation of UN resolutions 687 and 1441.
2. Hussein's crimes against humanity surpass those of Milosevic.
3. Just over 3 months ago, North Korea was in a very similar situation as 
Iraq.

You continually refuse to address these, and then say that I am like a 
drunken bar room brawler? Have you even considered that my agitation is due 
to frustration with you about this?

>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.

No, you are not a coward. But if you really believed what Foucault says 
here:

>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

then you wouldn't have written this:

"The below is pure bullshit, as crifasi persisits in mimicing the rush 
limbaugh mode of interpretation: arrogance, deception, hubris, dishonesty, 
and just plain not-nice-ness. tsk tsk tsk..."

That's what makes me so agitated and frustrated with you Henry. Not only do 
you refuse to address my given reasons, but then you turn around and write 
the above, while invoking Foucault whose criticism applies precisely to what 
you wrote! Accusing someone of infantile "rightism" is just as 
unenlightened.

>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.

And which person does this apply more to: one who addresses the reasons of 
the interlocutor, or one who does not?

>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 which person does this apply more to: one who addresses the reasons of 
the interlocutor, or one who does not?

>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;

Sound familiar, Henry?:

"The below is pure bullshit, as crifasi persisits in mimicing the rush 
limbaugh mode of interpretation: arrogance, deception, hubris, dishonesty, 
and just plain not-nice-ness. tsk tsk tsk..."

Do you even glimpse how little you are following what he is saying here?

Anthony Crifasi

>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
>



_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online  
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963



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