A Dissertation on Invective

Marc Angenot, La parole pamphlétaire

From Marc Angenot’s La parole pamphlétaire (Paris: Payot, 1982):

This work is dedicated to the theoretical description of what is usually called the “literature of combat.” It’s built up from an examination of a corpus of polemical texts — pamphlets and satires — that appeared in France and the Francophone world in the modern era. They span one century more or less, from the spring of 1868 — when Henri Rochefort threw his firebomb La Lanterne at the weakened Second Empire — to the spring of 1968 when the “Events of May” also marked, ambiguously, the end of an era and were accompanied by an bright efflorescence of polemical writings …

In organizing this work, I had two goals. My immediate objective was to describe and analyse from a typological point of view a literary genre — the pamphlet, flanked by two contiguous forms, polemic and satire — that can, it seems, be defined by a cluster of typical qualities. Beyond this narrow objective, I tried to ascertain the elements of the “essayistic,” of a general methodology of the literature of ideas, in relation with a topique, and a doxology of modern ideological debates. I drew on this study of the pamphlet to help me attempt to reevaluate, reinterpret and integrate into semiotic research that kind of rhetoric, once essential, but today quite neglected (ever since the classical age) — Inventio. In particular, it seems to me that it may be essential to reinstitute as fundamental to all theories of discourse a topique whose intersubjective role was brought to light by Aristotle.

If one had to judge polemicists according to the criteria of aesthetic value and cultural impact that are ordinarily applied to literary works, the very enterprise would be rather questionable. Despite the “brio,” the wit, and the “grip” [patte] of certain pamphleteers, who’s still interested in the debates over Bergsonism or the participation of socialists in bourgeois government? All this unchained passion need no longer attract any attention save that of the specialist’s cold gaze … in the making of this study I found myself embarrassed to have to quite cursorily introduce the immediate circumstances that surrounded the analyzed works. My approach however neglects the anecdotal level: the critique of the ideological systems underlying the debates seems to me of a continual topicality …

Concerning the postulates of generic research, I postulate the equivalence of the notion of genre with that of ideological configuration. I don’t consider the genre “pamphlet,” and the adjacent genres of “polemic” and “satire” in our nomenclature), to be transhistorical and ideologically neutral forms in which political or aesthetic content was realized by one work after another … [pp. 9-11]

Later, in his chapter on “Rhetoric,” Angenot writes:

I don’t hope to classify and extract from the corpus of pamphlets every kind of stylistic modulation … In polemical texts we deal with phenomena that are more diffuse than the figures one can “isolate” in a poetic text for example. The rhetorical modality and its impact are only perceptible here in reference to a larger context. Certain phenomena inventoried, however characteristic they may be, correspond poorly to the subdivisions of ancient rhetoric … We cannot escape a foundational question. Namely, what allows us to identify certain phenomena as figures? The ancient criteria seem perfectly incoherent. The tropes of classical rhetoric group together rather clearly what the linguist would call “metasememes” …

1. FIGURES OF ASSERTION

We’ll call assertivité the emphatic modalization of the assertion. It’s not just a question of affirming but also authenticating the assertion, “authenticating the speech by saying it,” as O. Ducrot writes [Dire, 21]. A certain intensity in the assertion can be produced by varying means: pamphlet discourse, torn between evidence and paradox, seeks to make what it says present, intense, pregnant; it hammers its truth and its evidence, it conflates proof and aplomb. The repetition of a thesis eventually produces an effect of suggestion. Certain texts, nearly devoid of dialectical subordination, are just literally a series of juxtaposed assertions whose ideological presuppositions determine the sequence:

The Jews are our masters (…). The Jew is the king of gold, of the Bank and of Justice (…). It’s the Jews who command as absolute masters (…) the untamed blood alliance endures (…). The Jew is dictator of the soul. [Céline, Bagatelles, 50-51]

… Preterition, “figure by which one calls attention to an object while feigning not to,” should be counted among the assertive devices; in that it reinforces the magnitude of the speech’s evidence, in that it introduces into the discourse an element of urgency or hierarchies in the refutation, it has an eminently polemical function:

I’ll skip over the title, unwise in my opinion, that you gave to your response. I’ll also pass over two or three contradictions that I don’t want to exploit. [Camus, Actuelles, “Première réponse à E. d’Astier]

Professions of good faith: Elsewhere I’ve made allusion to appeals to posterity, the appeal to the qualified judge, that sometimes are just conventional means for declaring indisputable that which is alleged:

An objective mind would accept one saying that …

In a similar fashion, all professions of good faith are meant to radiate a certain assertive quality. One finds them in the form of denials:

…with no intention of polemicizing …

I say it without emphasis: …

The profession of good faith can lead, in [for example] the frenetic style of Léon Bloy, all the way to the welcoming of punishment:

I’d quite like someone to boil my ass if I find them a better job [Zola’s Lourdes, to the latrines]

If this horrid macaroni hasn’t been served thirty times, I ask that my ass be flayed before a wide public.

Epanorthosis: “Feedback, or epanorthosis (…) consists of returning to what one said, either to reinforce it or to soften it, or even to retract it completely, depending on whether one affects to find it or have it found too slick or too strong, too unwise, or too inconvenient” … It can attract attention to a possible reversal of viewpoint. The “let me be well understood” demands of the reader renewed attention …

2. CONTRASTS AND PARADOXES

Oxymoron can be considered as a figure-symptom of pamphlet discourse. By that we mean a linguistic schema that … betrays a “manner of thinking” integral to the genre. The pamphleteer has the feeling of living in a “world upside-down,” submitted to a systematic perversion of values … The oxymoron is thus the condensed expression of this malaise … The degraded world realizes the conjunction of contraries. It’s as illogical as immoral, its partisans being incapable of perceiving their own contradiction … “hateful charity” … “comfortable violence” … “classics of the avant-garde” … “worldly proletariat” … “audacious conformism.”

Dilemma. Another figure-symptom. The dilemma isn’t a mode of reasoning; it’s an oratorical manner for presenting reasoning under the form of an alternative, squeezing the reader, such that no matter what solution he chooses he’ll find himself shown up or contradicting himself. It’s the paradigmatic weapon for trapping the adversary in absurdity …

If it’s glorious as you pretend, why don’t you want me to speak of it? If it’s not glorious, why did you do it?

… One shouldn’t confuse the dilemma with the alternative; in this latter figure, the immediate absurdity of one of the branches is the proof a contrario of the other proposition:

Either Bergson is a great philosopher and thus the concrete is not concrete and life isn’t life, or this is nothing but a charade of the concrete and life and thus M. Bergson is not a great philosopher.

Antimetabole. The antimetabole is another figure of opposition, a sort of chiasmus where the same words are repeated in the order A.B x B.A:

The press of freedom is, as we can see, the inverse of the freedom of the press.

I’ve led a dog’s life, not life’s bitch.

When a test is precise, it’s not interesting, and when it could be interesting, it’s not precise.

… Paradoxism. The paradox isn’t a rhetorical figure — it designates all propositions that go against certain received opinions but that intuition or experience nonetheless make us sense as true. At the “superficial” level of the expression, the paradoxical thought willingly expresses itself in the form of the limit or paradoxism, a statement where the polemicist recalls in contrasting terms the scandal he’s looking to denounce. He must “defamiliarize” the masquerade, present it in a raking light so that its absurdity is visible to the eye:

The populace thinks it’s pursuing liberty best when it’s threatening that of others.

3. FIGURES OF AGGRESSION

A. “Verbal violence.” As we’ve already established, the primitive and minimal form of the pamphlet is invective. The spectacle of scandal and masquerade demand the explosion of anger, the aggressive abreaction, no doubt all the more aggressive the more the pamphleteer feels overrun, threatened and impotent. However, the pamphleteer’s anger, at least that which appears in a composed discourse, can never be the “pure” expression of affect, as the myth associated with the genre would have us believe. The “virility” of the pamphleteer, his intellectual courage, and his violence must be signified and even over-signified, which doesn’t happen without a rhetorical guile that, in many cases, should arouse in the reader a certain unease. Less often an honest man, the outraged witness to scandal, the pamphleteer tends to frequently become a demagogic imprecator, for whom all blows are good ones — the nobility of the cause being a sufficient guarantee.

The Père Duchêne is here the model of this fundamental ambiguity. All political discourse, all ideological assertion is in itself violence. The rhetoric of discourse redoubles this violence in sprinking bougre and foutre amid the text’s demonstrative development. “These vulgarities, Roland Barthes writes, don’t mean anything but they signal. What? An entire revolutionary situation. Thus we have an example of writing whose function isn’t only to communicate or express but also to impose a [world] beyond language, which is at the same time History and the part we play in it. [Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, 1953, p. 7]

What interests us here is the coexistence in the text of argumentation and aggression, of enthymeme [”an informally stated syllogism … with an unstated assumption“] and insult, or persuasion and intimidation — a fundamental ambiguity. It makes us remember that argument can itself be a form of violence.

In the pages that follow I attempt only to describe some specifical rhetorical facts. One must remember however that these are just some specific elements of this general terrorism — and by terrorism I mean all those means that are non-demonstrative, non-argumentative, looking to discredit the adversary, to disquiet the reader, to discourage controversy, to threaten without refuting. Certainly simple argumentation doesn’t suffice: the writer is always searching for a touching supplement that will guarantee him emotional support, if not the blind and visceral support of his listener. Balanced minds are carried away …

I have several times indicated how certain common types of reasoning carry a necessary terrorist dimension — the argumentum ad verecundiam [appeal to authority], the refutation by disqualification… We’ll see later varied dialogical means with which the polemicist takes hold of adverse speech, hooks it, cuts it down, stuffs it with insulting connotations, and boomerangs it upon his enemies.

Let’s note again that irony and sarcasm are indirect forms of aggression, that humor is destructive and that the satirical gives the double advantage of seeming benign and jovial while it gives in to aggressive passion.

Joking, irony, jesting — these are “political means.” There’s politics as soon as they appear. It becomes a affair of total destruction — which is to say, by way of expedients — without regard to true value. It’s not about opposing a thought with another thought, but rather a thought with a blow or a disorder. [Paul Valéry, Mélanges]

Another advantage of the “bon mot,” in a civilization such as France’s, imbued with a certain image of homme d’esprit, is the elevated degree of transmissibility …

The unrefined image that ideology offers of the “virile” and intrepid pamphleteer reflects this ambiguity that is his lot. It’s the dragon-slaying archangel who willingly changes into a cafe shouter, that one being a warning for this one. The feeling of possessing the truth, what an alibi, sometimes, for hate and bad faith! …

If demonstration is weak, outrageousness and a rush of vulgarity arrive to carry off converts.

Proust is the psychology of a butt hair cut in four. [Crevel, Dali, p.6]

… Provocation, in literature, never appears without a dose of complacency, and if the author shows his satisfaction overly, he risks annoying more than he intimidates:

Never having had the good taste to respect the bon ton, I can admit that, on the whole, the young piss me off. [Sternberg, Lettre, 100]

… B. Stylistic and Logical Discordances. I call “discordant” any statement that passes abrubtly from one code to another, from one logic to another, from one level of language to another, and notably from a “literary” level to a “vulgar” level. This last case is the most common. By transgressing the norm, by resorting to a popular, unrefined expression, polemic seeks to intensify its statement; it makes itself provocative in tone as much as in content. Note that “vulgar” here denotes an affective ornatus as much as a manner of “talking street,” that in printed discourse violence is identified with informal, plebeian, slangy language …

… Logical Discordance. Violation of the logic of connection and comparison, faulty linkages of causes with effects, feigned ignorance of axiological hierarchies, surreptitious movement from one type of determination to another, intentional paralogism. One would try in vain to enumerate all the humorous modes of subverting discursive logic … Rivarol said of Mirabeau: “For money he’s capable of doing anything, even something good.”

C. Polemical Tropology.

a. Polemical use of metaphor. To every ideology there’s a corresponding phraseology composed of fixed images whose expressivity is eroded with use:

The military octopus and the Catholic vampire … [Darien, France, p. 87]

… In an abstract context, distinguishing the three primary tropological mechanisms - synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor — is often difficult … Metaphors that transpose a concrete object into an abstract context produce easier reading and more immediately effective polemic … Reader’s Digest as the “Coca-Cola of literature.” These images insinuate a certain number of ideological connotations that are here condensed: anti-Americanism, the implicit paradigm of “Coca-Cola vs. French wine,” depreciation of Coca-Cola as an insignificant, stimulating, anodyne and syrupy beverage, consumed indefinitely without profit but without risk. The Reader’s Digest-Coca-Cola connection initiates a global critique, obviously derisive were the author to explain it, of “American civilization.” It’s the nature of all ideological discourse to suggest such allusive extensions, to exploit prejudices at the same time that it pretends to exercise its independent judgment. We can see in any case that in polemical writing metaphor can’t be judged solely by criteria of analogical intelligibility. The polemic force of a metaphor is determined by the specific “quality” of the metaphorical medium, whose shocking, disagreeable, “improper” character produces a disturbing effect and on occasion a rupture of tone:

The radical party is the open sore of the Republic [G. Matzneff, Combat, I.X. 1964]

Then there’s Leon Bloy’s singular exclamation commenting on Zola’s interminable feuilleton Fécondité:

Makes you think of a corpse masturbating. [Bloy, Je m’accuse, 62.]

… What matters in analogy is that it substitutes for an abstract proposition; it introduces into the discourse a semantic discordance whose effects of shortcircuiting and intensification take the place of persuasive force …

The continuing metaphor or the prolonged comparison are the most common processes of concretization … This type of development is unfortunately “easy” … The “vigor” of the connecting conceals the absurdity of the point of departure.

Metaphor as underlying argumentation. … Henri Morier uses the word épitrope for that metaphorical figure that serves to justify an opinion:

Catholicism is an iron rod. One cannot reason with an iron rod. (E. Renan)

Very frequently a metaphorical field is constituted through a development that insinuates a banal analogy that takes the place of argumentation …

Warping and reinscribing the metaphors of the adversary’s discourse. Metaphorical remotivation often serves to draw out a banal image with depreciating connotations authorized by semantic contiguity. If in Christian phraseology, the faithful are designated as “the sheep,” “the flock,” “the herd,” the polemicist can speak of their “communal baaing” …

Note: Rhetoric and ideology: the case of metaphor. … the choice of the metaphorical field, far from being determined only by the “laws” of analogy,” can appear as an ideological symptom, and in extreme cases, as a failed act revelatory of imperfectly assumed presuppositions. Certain axiological postulates that betray an archaic mentality only appear in metaphorical displacement. The two most constant examples of recourse to these ideological fields signal a profound component of the thinking of the right — they are the bio-medical metaphors on the one hand and the “sexist” metaphors on the other.

The transformation of an historical phenomenon into a pathogenic agent in the “body” of the nation, it seems to us, always suffices to indicate a reactionary ideology. Already in 1792, Rivarol denounced the “peuple gangréné de mauvaises maximes,” an image that the right has reused consistently through the present: “The family, morals, work, pleasure, it’s all been infected with gangrene” … This biologization of history equally well produces antonymic images, those of “political health,” “political remedies” that must be prescribed, “healthy” talents … One could make the same remarks of the sexist images so abundant in Drumont, Bernanos, and Celine, images tired out by their banality certainly but obligingly repurposed:

France doesn’t have the virility of old.

Our politics is suddenly crumbling under female excitation and abandon.

Compared with the militant, the man from the totalitarian mass plays the role of the female to the male.

b. Polemical synecdoche. Theoreticians of rhetoric don’t seem to have at all studied tropological mechanisms in terms of exchanging abstract words with the same denotative nucleus but with discordant connotations. That is however the most elusive and the most constant procedure of all polemical attack. If one substitutes for “partisan,” “ally” or “defender,” the words “courtier” [thuriféraire, literally “incense carrier”], “faithful,” or “zealot,” one adds by synecdoche to the semes common to these two series the idea of religion and even religious fanaticism …

c. Mythologisms. … any evocation of an historico-mythical model to illuminate a particular behavior … Culture and history are treated as repositories of anecdotal monads whose significance is unequivocal …

d. Wordplay. … by offering a double meaning, by altering a fixed syntagm, such mechanisms cannot be distinguished from oratorical syllepsis and are to be considered as tropes …

e. Double entendre. A kind of wordplay that plays not on a chance encounter of phonemes but on polysemy/homonymy. By syllepsis, the word is employed in two radically different ways at the same time.

France comprises … 36 million subjects, not counting the subjects of miscontent …

f. Neologism. Neologism in pamphlets is exclusively functional. It’s born not of creative reverie within language but aims to stigmatize the adversary and his practices … The “-ard” derivation dominates; one finds it already in “chéquards,” in the era of Panama, and the “quarante-huitards.” There’s also the “-aille” derivatives:

la radicaille (portmanteau word compressing “canaille radicale“)

la blumaille (partisans of Léon Blum) …

D. Insult and its rhetoric… [invective] retains supporters, from Léon Blum to the surrealists — all those whose ideological exasperation makes them reject formal argumentation, suspecting it of tepidness, centrism, and spinelessness. Léon Blum is, of all the modern pamphleteers, the one whose discourse, devoted to prophetic malediction, moves with the greatest ease and the least demonstrative subtlety between the highs of angelic praise and the lows of excremental invective:

These ill-fated servants of Justice and Beauty (…) the most noble beings (…) elevated and proud souls (…) men starved for Beauty and the Infinite …

But, on the same page:

Pig-farmers … purulent idiots (…) countless little jackals (…) the filth that passed for their hearts (…) digestive entrails (…) sty … [see here]

This is what made traditional criticism say that the pamphlet is a matter of temperament. I’d prefer to say that the discourse is charged, not guilelessly, with pantomiming affective intensity — the discharge of “superego-ist” proscriptions (in the psychoanalytic jargon), the transgression of the rules of good conduct and sexual and scatalogical taboos grants the reader a release by proxy [par personne interposé].

a. Refused a name. To insult is first of all to refuse the attacked his “proper” name, to refuse to identify him. Very systematically polemicists of the right … anxious to exclude the adversary from the national community have practiced this type of dishonor — thus the Third Reich soon took it upon itself to “de-baptize” Jews endowed with Aryan names, to subsequently reduce the racial enemy to a number or a generic appelation … One cannot attribute a name to someone who belongs to a lesser humanity. If he’s prepared to, it’s with such masquerade and circumlocution that it fools no one

The Hungarian Jew who responds to the name of Victor Basch …

Such procedures … always anticipate the physical elimination of their object …

b. “Mister,” first name, tutoiement. “Mister,” this title whose omission in oral exchange is an imprudent or anomalous thing, becomes an offense when it’s printed,” J.-L. Borges noted [Fictions, 66]. The title permits in any case the establishment of a certain haughty distance … it can also be employed with irony …

c. Altered name, “etymological” speculations. …

d. Sobriquets. …

e. Blatant insult. … insult as a general rule has two domains of predilection, impossible to separate, that of obscenity or sexual implication, and that of scatology or excremental vocabulary. Polemic calls forth a sublimation of values that entails a representation of baseness identified with bodily functions — sexuality and excretion.

All the more “weak” insults would seem to converge on this pole of attraction … “sale, salope, immonde, goujat, puant, fétide, ignoble, odieux, merdeux, gateux, venimeux” … “castrat, pédéraste, impuissant, avorton” … The old idealist dichotomy is in full swing here: man is a mind that cannot have a sex, a body, or matter without regressing to the animal realm; the grotesque is precisely this odious melange of the human and the bestial …

f. Strings of invective. Insult, which is an explosion of aggressive intensities, tends to sprawl out, to “unspool” in lewd litanies where the pamphleteer exhausts himself in a sort of orgasm of aggression and opprobrium …

Albert Wolff, the Prussian virgin, the ancient weeping willow Laurent Thiboust, the outdated clown Villemessant, the only being whose hand the lowdown Valles ever refused to shake, the infinite eunuch, the frightful obscene monkey of Critique and the purulent Orpheus of blackmail! (etc.)

… The art of this consists of not running out of breath too soon …

E. Scatology. … scatology is a “political weapon” that can paradoxically lay claim to a noble tradition. It’s the paradigmatic means for taking down your adversary “by erasing all distinction of rank and virtue,” as noted by Hodgart who notably evoked “Swift’s fecal obsession.” Criticism little manages to distinguish it from obscenity — in both cases natural functions are rejected by the same taboo. The sublimated mind denies with horror the visceral, the sexual and the excremental; the ignoble other becomes the guarantor of the nobility of the ego.

The double advantage of polemical coprolalia is the power to say the forbidden all the while denying any relation with the excremental. The Freudian school well illuminated this process and N.O. Brown, in Eros and Thanatos, notably studied the “excremental vision” of the world.

What’s striking in pamphlet discourse is this journey between two poles — between demonstrative neutrality, disembodied appeals to principles and laws, and affective expression, unchained violence a discourse where the speaker hides behind enthymatic anonymity in order to reappear through speech of pure intensity, ambiguous discourse full of sublimation, of Verneinung, of resentment, of intermittent violence. Treating your adversary like a “scatophage” [shit-eater], as Baudelaire did for the French, this is apparently to deny your own relationship with excrement [Dr. Laforgue, L’Echec de Baudelaire (Paris, 1931).] Isn’t it obvious moreover that the insulting explosion with which one “covers” the adversary is a verbal substitute for defecation — a manner of separating oneself from the “bad object” …

4. METALOGISM

Following the Rhétorique générale, I’ll define metalogism as any apparent alteration of the logic of discourse, so long as the form of the statement doesn’t correspond to its function in the economy of the text (concession, chleuasme [feigned profession of modesty]), the literal meaning takes on a second indirect or lacunar (allusive) signification, or there appear intentional misinterpretations or paralogisms (antiphrase, metalogic humor). The context of the metalogic statement should permit the reader to reestablish a functionally hidden signification by a process of transformation.

a. Concession. … even when a statement actually concedes a point to an adversary, concession is most often just a tactical maneuver that aims to avoid engaging the enemy on disadvantageous terrain … It presents itself in the general form of “it’s possible that … but …” In an even craftier fashion, one can seem to concede to the adversary more than he even demands, in order to put in doubt the position he’s defending in retaliation.

Maurice Bardèche concedes in his Nuremberg (1947), or feigns to concede, that there was every reason to liquidate without trial Goering and the other Nazi criminals, but he does this to declare equally worthless and obscene the “judicial parody” they were submitted to.

Any concession to an individual can be an attack directed at him — with the secondary benefit for the polemicist of seeming generous and equitable — if I concede to him the complexity of the problems he had to face … I can still accuse him of not having hewn to the same standards that animate my own speech; had he done so, he would have overcome the obstacles. (We find here the ethical connection between truth and courage.) …

Certainly there are good excuses, we duly recognize that …

… The counter-attack often remains ironically implicit. When we read that “there’s obviously nothing to object to in lines this commendable,” we guess that Paul Sérant is insinuating that “these lines” are unfortunately just “commendable” — which doesn’t prevent them from being stupid.

b. Pseudo-retraction.

c. Chleuasme. In this figure the polemicist ostentatiously pretends to accuse himself in order to bring back to the surface his own righteousness and to indirectly attack his adversary:

I most humbly confess that I don’t have the mind to enter into the etherealities of our refined politics.

It’s one of my vices: I love to give to words and to receive from them the least imprecise meaning possible.

… Henri Rochefort, in order to respond to his adversaries, who accused him of enjoying ill-gotten luxuries …

It was a beautiful April morning. I’d just killed my father; two of my children, their feet tied to their bed, twisted with pangs of hunger, while I, happily seated before some silver plates stolen from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, sipped from a holy chalice a modest Moselle wine that I recommend to you …

One frequent mode of chleuasme is that where the author, instead of declaring that the writings attacking him are empty, confused or obscure, pretends to confess his stupidity …

The essence of all these feats of metalogic fiction and antiphrase is the reinforcement of the reader’s complicity, requiring him to participate in the discourse, to guess the hidden meaning.

In the chapter titled “Conclusions,” Angenot writes

1. Bilan et Perspectives.

“I feared that my pen would find itself compromised by descending into an arena full of the basest gladiators.” (Beaumarchais, Réponse….)

I’d like first to remind the reader that throughout this work, I have sought two ends that, I think, can support each other. I wanted to construct a typology of the pamphlet ending in a synthesis of the social function filled by the genre (to which we dedicate the chapters of this conclusion). We’ve also sought, beyond this first purpose, to construct a methodological ensemble, put to the test of the pamphlet corpus, but capable of illuminating the literature of ideas, the modern forms of persuasion and those of the ideologically probable or arguable.

The typological description of pamphlet discourses constitutes but one fragment of a work that remains to be accomplished in this domain of the “literature of ideas.” As we indicated at the beginning, the current state of research in this domain is hardly satisfactory, in particular among French-language researchers. At the risk of repetition, this isn’t just to excuse the lacunae and shortcomings of my project …

3. Genre, Social discourse, Ideologies.

A. The politics of the pamphlet.

In seeking henceforth to reintroduce the social subject into the typological description that I’ve given of the pamphlet genre, I risk presenting the genre as a correlated ensemble of instances of false consciousness. The pamphlet, as a cultural tradition, appears to us as a fixed form and thus can be associated with a certain ideological modus operandi whose reach is larger, with a “latent” ideology, the opposite of what can be critical thought. The paradoxical image that the pamphleteer gives of his mandate, the crepuscular vision of the world that is axiomatic for him, the coexistence established between persuasion and “verbal violence,” the connection between truth-liberty-solitude, the fact that the pamphlet presents itself as a discourse opposed to that of Authority and Power all the while reproducing its features in a terrorist fashion — all these characteristics have the effect of blocking or distorting critical capacity …

[The pamphleteer says:] There’s scandal (triumphant error imposed upon the Powers and travestied in truth). I must denounce it, with no mandate for my action other than scorned truth. Finally, this mandate is at once urgent and futile – it’s already too late to reverse the course of the degradation of values (this is what we have called the “crepuscular” vision of the pamphleteer’s world; III, 4). We’ll now attempt to show the internal logic of the recurring expressions and to interpret them as political practice.

Scandal and truth.

The pamphleteer offers an image of himself of a solitary conscience, courageous if not reckless. The mandate he attributes to himself as defender of truth returns to sublimate the absence of social mandate that he suffers. A social contract has been broken: the pamphleteer is, let’s remember, always in conflict with the subgroup from which he borrows his principles and imperatives, and not at all with his “natural” adversaries. The pamphlet will structure this conflict using a series of shows of strength [coups de force] which permit the ideological agent to give himself a sublimated image of his relation to historical contradictions …

It follows from all this that, if the pamphlet presents itself on the surface as a tragic and pessimistic discourse, if nonetheless affirms and reinstalls a strong positivity, of powerful certitudes, therein lies part of its political efficacy: autonomy of thought, accessibility of truth, the transcendence of this over historical conflict, dialectic of violence, contradiction between success and justice, metaphysical identification of the powers with the usurpation. The pamphleteer communes with his public with resentment and indignation, but he also recuperates essential maxims that permit him to hide the reality of his ideological project.

Violent speech.

I’ve shown how the pamphlet, even outside the insulting abreactions of ad hominem invective, requires violence, verbal violence, argumentative terrorism, warlike conceptions of the clash of ideas and of refutation — not only does the pamphlet conflate persuasion and violence, but it’s essential to the genre to wrap itself in the glory of this and to moralize it …

Innocent violence, pure violence, they suggest to us, because it’s just a reaction brought about by institutional violence. Honest violence because it’s direct, the opposite of propaganda’s indirect, hypocritical, cunning violence, of clandestine persuasion …

Ambiguous admirer of homespun terrorism and later of state terrorism, the pamphleteer makes of terrorism the rhetorical texture of his discourse. The pamphlet is a spectacle; the pamphleteer “makes a scene,” in the hysterical sense of the phrase … Confronted with the violence of the machine, the pamphleteer deploys a verbal violence that should clear his name. To this violence, which is from the beginning completely political, he tends to add a series of mystifications. The pamphlet is a theatrical act, the spectacle of the destruction of false idols …

The spectacle of freedom. …

The power of common sense. Another cultural “myth” is fired by pamphlet practice: that of cognitive humanism, of the uselessness (if not harmfulness) of specialized knowledge. It’s not without demagogy that the polemicist forever reminds you that he isn’t a specialist, not a “professional politician” when speaking of politics, not a professor when pronouncing on aesthetics, nothing but an honest man …

The crepuscular vision of the world. …

B. The pamphleteer as “problematic hero.” …

The novel conceives of individual desire as a radical lack and draws from this state of lack the necessary quest for an authentic world … G. Lukacs saw in Don Quixote the original paradigm of the novel as a specific historical form; the pamphleteer, a knight-errant, nostalgic for a lost golden age amid a degraded society, great destroyer of windmills, has frequently been referred to, in derision and in elogy, as a “Don Quixote” ready to put his disinterested pen in the service of noble causes …

C. Genre and ideological polarization: pamphlets “of the right”, pamphlets “of the left” …

D. The pamphleteer, the intellectual …

The pamphlet, symptom of the contradictions of the intellectual in modern society and the faux overcoming of these, appears as a simulation of an attitude of radical spirit, a travesty of analytical work in confusion and resentment. Or rather it must be said one last time that the “pure pamphlet” doesn’t exist — the subjectively true indignation of the polemicist can lead him to varying degrees of lucidity, but the contradictory conditions of his intellectual status, the varying modes of his alienation, the inability to survive rationally in the middle of the contradiction, produce a blockage of critical work of which the “pamphlet” type is the result. To paraphrase Cioran, I’d say that the pamphlet takes root when “the passage from logic to epilepsy” is consummated by will-to-power, Manichaeism, and need alienated from legitimacy [lorsque se consomme “le passage de la logique à l’épilepsie,” dans la volonté de puissance, le manichéisme, et le besoin aliéné de légitimité.].

[my rough translation]

 

6 August 2007 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment

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