Before I type in an important quotation from Foucault, I want to
emphasize that I don't intend this as a response to
"Joseph@xxxxxxxxx". Still less am I addressing him directly. On the
contrary, my whole point is that I don't feel any need to respond to
him, and neither should anyone else. Indeed, I claim to have "a
priori" knowledge that I am justified in deleting his posts sight
unseen, which I would be doing EVEN IF I HAD THE TIME to read them,
which I of course do not. Since some people on the list, though more
intelligent than Joseph@xxxxxxxxx, have the impression that the
contempt shown toward him is somehow irrational (namely, "ad hominem")
in character, I think it might be worthwhile to recall what Foucault
said about this matter.
Foucault, like everyone else, occasionally came accross texts written
by assholes. What was his attitude? Basically, it was similar to
that of Habermas. Both thought/think that it would be irrational NOT
to repudiate the continuation of a conversation with someone whose
manner of "conversing" is manifestly "an obstacle to the search for
truth" (as Foucault put it). I reproduce, below, Foucault's argument,
which implies that it would be irrational to try to converse with some
one like joseph@xxxxxxxxx.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
"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 who do 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....Questions and answers depend on a game...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
privileges 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 the truth, but an
adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very
existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game does not
consist of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to
speak, but of abolishing him, as interlocutor, from any possible
dialogue....
"Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a
polemic?....There is something even more serious here: in this comedy,
one mimics war, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders,
putting forward as much of one's killer 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....One does not 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....[T]hey were the real consequences of a
polemic attitude whose effects ordinarily remain suspended."
-- M. Foucault, "Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations"
(Rabinow, ed., _Foucault Reader_)
Similar considerations are discussed in, for example, the
"Introduction" to Habermas's _Theory and Pracice_.
Steve
SoBlo
Toronto
emphasize that I don't intend this as a response to
"Joseph@xxxxxxxxx". Still less am I addressing him directly. On the
contrary, my whole point is that I don't feel any need to respond to
him, and neither should anyone else. Indeed, I claim to have "a
priori" knowledge that I am justified in deleting his posts sight
unseen, which I would be doing EVEN IF I HAD THE TIME to read them,
which I of course do not. Since some people on the list, though more
intelligent than Joseph@xxxxxxxxx, have the impression that the
contempt shown toward him is somehow irrational (namely, "ad hominem")
in character, I think it might be worthwhile to recall what Foucault
said about this matter.
Foucault, like everyone else, occasionally came accross texts written
by assholes. What was his attitude? Basically, it was similar to
that of Habermas. Both thought/think that it would be irrational NOT
to repudiate the continuation of a conversation with someone whose
manner of "conversing" is manifestly "an obstacle to the search for
truth" (as Foucault put it). I reproduce, below, Foucault's argument,
which implies that it would be irrational to try to converse with some
one like joseph@xxxxxxxxx.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
"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 who do 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....Questions and answers depend on a game...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
privileges 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 the truth, but an
adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very
existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game does not
consist of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to
speak, but of abolishing him, as interlocutor, from any possible
dialogue....
"Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a
polemic?....There is something even more serious here: in this comedy,
one mimics war, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders,
putting forward as much of one's killer 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....One does not 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....[T]hey were the real consequences of a
polemic attitude whose effects ordinarily remain suspended."
-- M. Foucault, "Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations"
(Rabinow, ed., _Foucault Reader_)
Similar considerations are discussed in, for example, the
"Introduction" to Habermas's _Theory and Pracice_.
Steve
SoBlo
Toronto