Stanley Fish's review of Wendy Brown's "Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire." Fish annoys me, but I happen to think he often makes good points -- sometimes really good ones.<br><br><b class="sans">
</b><a href="http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=f2281gdy909q6jfczpj22f7gtkg3cqft">http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=f2281gdy909q6jfczpj22f7gtkg3cqft</a><br>________________________<br><br>"Sounds good, but Brown isn't having any. Her critique of tolerance
challenges the common assumption that the differences the sharp edges
of which tolerance is supposed to blunt "took their shape prior to the
discourse called on to broker them." No, she insists, those differences
are <i>produced</i> by a regime of tolerance that at the same time
produces a status quo politics built on the assumption that difference
cannot be negotiated but can only be managed. When difference is
naturalized, she explains, it becomes the mark not of an ideological or
political divide (in relation to which one might have an argument), but
of a cultural divide (in relation to which each party says of the
other, "See, that's just the way they are"). If people do the things
they do not because of what they believe, but because they are Jews,
Muslims, blacks, or gays, it is no use asking them to see the error of
their ways, because it is through those same ways — <i>naturally</i> theirs — that they see at all. When President Bush reminds us of '"the <i>nature</i>
of our enemy,"' he is, in effect, saying there's no dealing with these
people; they are immune to rational appeals; the only language they
understand is the language of force.<br>...<br>"On balance, I think it is the latter; she wants a better universalism
than liberalism's, but her articulations of it are without content, as
they will necessarily be if she thinks to derive it from her critique
of liberalism and liberal tolerance. That critique, to repeat the point
made earlier, tells you what liberal tolerance is made of; it doesn't
tell you whether it is bad or good, and it certainly doesn't tell you
what should be put in its place. A phrase like "deep knowledge of
others" is a teaser: Deeper than what? Deep, how? How deep do we go? If
the knowledge is deeper than the surface differences — of religion,
ideology, culture, tradition — that now divide us, then what it brings
us to is the "thin" personhood of liberalism and a politics in which
substantive beliefs are subordinated to some form of Kantian
proceduralism, precisely what Brown has been arguing against. And if
the knowledge is deeper than the caricatures that fill our political
rhetoric, and what we're supposed to do is really understand, say, the
Islamic temperament from the inside, then we would either have to
become Muslim (in which case we would inherit the exclusionary as well
as the generous aspects of that faith), or we would have to view Islam
from a perspective above all faiths, and that would again bring us to
classical liberalism and its claim (denied by Brown) to occupy a
position that is not one."<br>