What speech for what action in times of programmed lack of culture and pathologization of critical thinking?
It is literally and ontologically unacceptable to speak of human beings, of free and legal subjects, or of subjects of law, by speaking of them in the form of elements of genetic, generational series, in the manner of Mendel: certain French people would second, third or umpteenth generation, as if these human persons were then unassimilable peas or substantialized monads, irrefragable in and by history, dehumanized and without subjectivity other than that of the gaze reifying them in a "generation". There is in this discursive logic an anthropology of genetics and a biopolitics of the refusal of historicity which confer on this type of "discourse" a hygienist, objectivist, scientistic allure, as if the being of these "strains" belonged de facto to an essence immiscible with the socio-historical determinations which give and compose the real, concrete forms of our freedoms and our existences.
There are currently, on the part of the "professionals" of public discourse, murderous crystallizations in the fact of speaking without properly measuring the symbolism of the concepts which inhabit (in) the language in an intricate way and which must be constantly redefined ( sense of the work of the intellectual, in part), each time you speak, to avoid the pitfalls of language and the ease of representation(s) too often induced by a lack of concern for what it means to speak and what requires rigor in the applied exercise of thought, when it wants to express something other than the partiality of opinions imprisoned in the impatience of their limit.
If silence makes the rustle of possible words heard, it is clear that a fair, humble, singular thought opens the mind to the absence of all speech: the voice of those we hear only too rarely, if ever, by dint of covering them with words that make them invisible by dressing them in rigid signifiers like quirky taxonomies, inventing at the same time their "true" reality to better possess their life irreducible to the language of the tribe. Need we say it again: speaking, writing, thinking, is part of ethics or the art of making paths happen to get out, perhaps, of the obscurantist confusion that leads to the refusal to live and the dead ends of the night. prolonged that is the destitution of speech in "communication".
On the other hand, the banality of communicative communions where beautiful souls seek by complaisance the agreement without dialogue diverts the political link in the trap of recognition and allegiance which leads to binarism (for or against, with or against, friend/enemy, etc.) generous declarations but without courage other than that of the formal repetition of the intention to do well without ever doing. There is a risk here analogous to that of the anthropologies of the “pea”: covering up politics, which manages the aporias of living together by the inventions of sovereignty or Law, by morality and enthusiastic fervor.
“Beauty without strength hates understanding” (Hegel)
"Beauty without strength hates understanding" (Hegel): fervor does not like the exercise of thinking otherwise than one thinks because it delights in remaining in the hot fermentation of its narcissism too pure to be submitted to the appreciation of the judgment and the test of the argument.
Re-learning the nuptials of thought and speech is in itself a task that gives dignity to (re-) becoming a situational, or specific, intellectual today, despite the sound and the fury.
Salim Mokaddem
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