Michel Foucault on polemics
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 one 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 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 what
he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning
of 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 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 search for the truth
but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, 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 a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.
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