Reading Dallmayr's _The Other Heidegger_ last night reminded me of this
passage:
The polemicist . . . 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 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; 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 . . .
Perhaps, someday, a long history will have to be
written of polemics, polemics as a parasitic figure on
discussion and an obstacle to the search for 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 determining
the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary
principle that the adversary has neglected, ignored, or
transgressed; and it denounces this negligence 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 judiciary
practice, 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 proof
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 judgment and
by 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 interest, against
which one must fight until the moment this 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 theater. 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 sterilizing 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 make more and more risks in what they say, but to fall
back continually 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, 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. 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 were
the real consequences of a polemic attitude whose effects
ordinarily remain suspended.
"Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations: An Interview"
in _The Foucault Reader_, pp. 382-383
--John Ransom
Dickinson College
passage:
The polemicist . . . 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 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; 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 . . .
Perhaps, someday, a long history will have to be
written of polemics, polemics as a parasitic figure on
discussion and an obstacle to the search for 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 determining
the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary
principle that the adversary has neglected, ignored, or
transgressed; and it denounces this negligence 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 judiciary
practice, 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 proof
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 judgment and
by 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 interest, against
which one must fight until the moment this 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 theater. 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 sterilizing 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 make more and more risks in what they say, but to fall
back continually 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, 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. 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 were
the real consequences of a polemic attitude whose effects
ordinarily remain suspended.
"Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations: An Interview"
in _The Foucault Reader_, pp. 382-383
--John Ransom
Dickinson College