Anti-Racist Education 16: Intellectual Terrorism

[Duncan Coons]

A Cliff's Notes Version of Anti-Racist Post Modernism

[Deconstructionist Jacques] Derrida's breathtaking equation (in an interview
with *Le Nouvel Observateur*) of Western "liberty of the spirit" with "all
Nazisms" is made even more baldly by one of his eager young followers,
Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who criticizes Heidegger for not going far enough:
he never realized that "Naziism is a humanism."

Mark Lilla, "What Heidegger Wrought," *Commentary*, January 1990

We must return to the idea of "genealogy" and consider its effects. If one
considers all discourse to be a symptom of a deeper unconscious (psychological,
social, even ontological), one will be less concerned with assessing the truth
of what is said than in making out the identity of the "hidden" spokesman. In
short, it will be less important to pay attention to *what* someone says than
to determine *who* he is, in order to know what he is really saying. One can
imagine what strange idea of intellectual debate flows from this
presupposition. The content of the speech will be replaced by the person
speaking and the determination of "where he's coming from." Once the "real
motives," unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable by the speaker, have been
uncovered, the genealogy then threatens to legitimize a disturbing brand of
intellectual terrorism. As [post-structuralist philosopher Michel] Foucault
himself did not hesitate to acknowledge, "From now on interpretation will
always be interpretation by means of the question, *who*? One will not ask what
there is in the thing signified, but essentially one will ask: who has put the
interpretation forward?" This is a detective's conception of dialogue that
becomes an interrogation, whose aim is not to discuss a topic, but to grill an
author in order to know with whom one is dealing.

From Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, "The Philosophies of '68," *Partisan Review*
56 (1989)