Polemics, Politics and Problemizations

"It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction." -- Mikhail Gorbachev

In the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of every person are in some ways immanent in discussion. For the person asking the questions, “exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself—by the logic of his own discourse he is tied to what he said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue is tied to what he has said earlier” (381)--a question therefore of what creates the relations of different experiences to politics. Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult. The polemicist proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. We can recognize today in polemics, three models: the religious model, the judiciary model, and the political model. It is on the order of problemization, or the development of a domain of acts, practices and thoughts that pose problems for politics—it is a question then, of thinking about the relations of these different experiences to politics. The problem, precisely, is that to decide if it is “actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles and the values one accepts” (385)—because it seems that the “we” must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result. On the one-hand, an effort widely asserted—is to ask politics a whole series of questions that were not traditionally a part of its statutory domain. It becomes a matter of determining the role of politics and ethics. “It then appears that any new solution that might be added to the others would arise from current problemization, modifying only several of the postulates or principles on which one bases the responses that one gives” (390).