Of gods and vampires: an introduction to psychoanalysis

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>On Sun, 3 Oct 1999 18:31:04 -0400 Yoshie Furuhashi
><furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Those who argue against 'authority' in any form in the interest of
>> postmodern politics inevitably fall into a performative contradiction
>> between what they want to argue and what they actually say.
>
>*IF* the argument for a performative contradiction is
>successful.  And it is not.  Habermas's reasoning is this:
>a performative contradiction is committed whenever the
>expressed content of a statement contradicts its
>presuppositions.

Habermas(yuck!)?  Why not Kenneth Burke?

Kenneth Burke wrote in "The Virtues and Limitations of Debunking" in _The
Philosophy of Literary Forms: Studies in Symbolic Action_, 3rd ed. (1st ed.
published in 1941, Berkeley: U of CA P, 1973):

*****   I think that the typical debunker is involved in a strategy of this
sort: He [sic] discerns an evil.  He wants to eradicate it.  Hence, in
order to be sure that he is _thorough enough_, he becomes _too thorough_.
In order to knock the underpinnings from beneath the arguments of his
opponents, he perfects a mode of argument that would, if carried out
consistently, also knock the underpinnings from beneath his own argument....

...[I]n order to shatter his opponents' policies, he adopts a position
whereby he could not logically advocate a policy of his own.  And then,
since there comes a point at which he too must advocate something or other,
he _covertly_ restores important ingredients of thought that he has
_overtly_ annihilated.... (171)   *****

What we need here is a study of rhetoric, that's all.

Yoshie