Dialogue and its Discontents

“The very notion of ‘dialogue’ is culturally specific and historically bound, and while one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is happening, another may be sure it is not.  The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated.  Otherwise, the model of dialogue risks relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes ‘agreement’ and ‘unity’ and indeed that those are the goals to be sought.”

-Judith Butler, 1990.  (Gender Trouble.  New York: Routledge.  Pg. 20)

Man-eaters

“To large extent, is not the noise of the revolver fired into the condemned man’s temple the same as the gas expelled by the autocrat in a shattering burp after a sumptuous meal?  The fact is that power, in the postcolony, is carnivorous…”

-Achille Mbembe, 2001 (On the Postcolony.  Berkeley: University of California Press.  Pg 201)

A Task

“People thinking in the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to accommodate within those forms the experience of violence which in reality annuls such thinking. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us”

-Theodor Adorno, “Johnny-Head-in-Air”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 56)