In an interview with Paul Rabinow shortly before his death, philosopher/activist Michel Foucault was asked the question, “Why is it that you don’t engage in polemics?” Foucault’s answer is counterpoint to modern political discourse:

“I like discussions, and when I’m asked questions, I try to answer them…If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of ‘infantile leftism,’ I shut it again right away. That’s not my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way. In the serious play of questions and answers…the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion…Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of the dialogue.”

For Foucault, this attention to form was more than simple good manners. People engaged in a discussion were partners in the search for truth—scientists testing a theory in the laboratory of debate. Compare this approach to the methods of the polemicist:

“The polemicist…proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking.” The person he confronts is “an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, whose very existence constitutes a threat.”

At the risk of sounding old, I can’t help but notice that this tone has crept into most aspects of our day-to-day communication. More telling than the disruptions of the Sotomayor hearings—garden variety political theater—are the comments that follow (see YouTube video)—representative of political posts across the internet.

It is hard, in American culture, to distinguish polemics from marketing trend and its dependents. Most of the polemical works on bookshelves seem to ape popular television debate—nightly shout fests where mutual respect just isn’t interesting television: better to pit two louts against each other in a race to the final one-liner. These works are more fanzines than systematic political theory; more troubling, they’re often a gateway to politics and political debate for the novice.

“Perhaps, someday, a long history will have to be written of polemics, polemics as a parasitic creature on discussion and an obstacle to the search for the truth,” Foucault mused. But I wonder: who in this society, where the line between information and entertainment is blurred and political insult is a favorite blood sport, is far enough removed from the polemical to write that history?

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