Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling
I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. [But] 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 right away. That’s not my way of doing things. (…) A whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other. (…)
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 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.
{ Michel Foucault, interview conducted by Paul Rabinow, May 1984 | Continue reading }
photo { Tony Stamolis }
