Anti-Racist Education 16: -=<>Intellectual Terrorism<>=-

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Subject: Anti-Racist Education 16:
-=<>Intellectual Terrorism<>=-
http://www.first-amendment.com/are/
Date: 25 Aug 1996 07:02:42 GMT

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)