>Help! I'm supposed to give a talk at a conference on polemic
(Gegenstand!)
>sponsored by the Columbia German department, and I'm feeling
uninspired.
>Any advice? Good stuff to read or talk about?
this may be of no help at all, especially in the time you have.... but.
peter Sloterdijk's _critique of cynical reason_.
a quote:
"... Pascal's observation that people who want to play the angel easily become the Devil,... a Devil who declares the opponent to be a devil in order to eliminate him or her with reasons that are all too good. The drama is thus not played out only between a good ego and an evil id. Rather, it comes into its explosive phase through the good ego meeting an opponent who consciously and unrepentingly takes it on itself to be that which dualism discriminated against as the evil half, that is, the *openly evil*, kynical evil ... and consequently, an evil that, viewed carefully, is perhaps no evil at all. (Therefore some moral revolutions begin with phases of kynical polemic in which the 'amoralists' openly plead guilty to what scandalises the others: Diogenes masturbates in the marketplace; women say, 'We had abortions'; men, 'Gay is beautiful'; doctors. 'We have practiced euthanasia, etc. Thus if evil can have an ego, only then does suspicion begin to plow up one's own moral consciousness. For the ego that hides in the evil id could indeed, because it is ego, also be my ego. Only the repression of this possibility produces the energy of the paranoid projection. With it, suspicion is blown up out of all proportion. Suspicion wants, at all costs, the again ban evil into the non-ego. It wants to burst the I-You relation that is inevitably given as soon as so-called evil enters as another ego. The diabolical thus manifests itself when an ego wants to defend at any price a dualism that has become untenable. ... Every ego can be a mirror or every other ego; those who do not want to see themselves take care that the others do not really ascend into the status of ego. The more unmistakably, however, the other ego has already shown itself to be a fact of life, the more fervent becomes the urge in the denying ego to smash the mirror. Paranoid and unreflective politics have the same structure, although on different levels. That in the course of European history this structure ascended to the dominating ideological reality several times ... proves the explosiveness of this structure, in which warlike antagonisms, metaphysical dualisms, and paranoid mechanisms coalesce. For this reason, I think, the understanding of kynicism - as conscious embodiment of that which has been negated, excluded, humbled and declared evil (id) - holds the key to the cynical bestiality with which in our culture the fanatical defenders of the so-called good have distinguished themselves so remarkably since time immemorial. And perhaps with the help of that doctrine that, of all philosophies, least of all represents a 'theory', more insight can be won into that counterposed philosophical tradition that began with Plato and presented itself as the highest possible form of theory as such: dialectics. For we would like to think that dialectics must remain immune against the dualistic-paranoid temptation. Does it not proceed from what the consciousness described earlier does not want to admit: from the conflict of positions and principles? Is it not its fundamental thought that against every thesis an antithesis must emerge and that this, which appears horrible to others, is in fact, good and correct - for the sake of the synthesis and the 'higher' truth born of the struggle?"
and for Sloterdijk's answer to that, you might have to read the book, but a hint: "The positive dialectic thus does not leave the realm of polemics but ends the dispute with a victor's dictate." and that, leads into a discussion of Adorno and negative dialectics....
angela