54b
LEO BERSANI
tions? The mild resurgence of life which liberal thought has recently
given signs of is not due to any effective political grouping in opposition
to a nonliberal government. Rather, the liberal position has been par–
tially reactivated thanks
to
the violent repudiation of that position by
more radical politics on the Left. But is opposition to radical opposition
a viable new life for liberalism?
It
is tempting, if not to think so, at
least to act as if that were the case. Thus, in what is perhaps a sad
epilogue to its history, liberalism as protest tends to be replaced by
liberalism setting the "legitimate" moral limits of protest.
I of course feel that the first necessity, now, is to organize protest
effectively and sanely. Militant radicalism has not consisted only in the
planting of bombs, and to refuse
to
discriminate between the Weather–
men and the Panthers, or even between a yippie love-in and a yippie
enactment of a Ronald Reagan scenario, may
be
to retreat into pol–
itics-as-usual.
If
we think that politics-as-usual will suffice to change
what we want to see changed, we should say so and also say what makes
us so optimistic.
If
we no longer feel this, we can stop wasting precious
time: the Administration, the FBI and the police will continue to keep
us on the alert for the dangers of radical violence, and the rest of
us might show more awareness of the fact that recent militancy has
not been limited to haphazard violence, and that today's fragmented
forms of radical protest contain
some
styles and strategies which can be
exploited and refined by less fragmented, more reasoned programs of
radical protest.
One final word about liter-ary criticism and politics. I certainly
don't want to "substitute" the former for the latter. Even if I did want
that, it would, as I argue in my essay, be impossible: literary criticism
implies political choices just as infallibly as political behavior employs
strategies of imaginative persuasion and is therefore liable to analyses
analogous to those used in literary criticism. Each of us is always a
mysterious compound of passion and analysis. (Poetic condensation ob–
scures the analytical; the discursiveness of criticism can both disguise
and tame the passion.) Analysis and criticism are activities of life; there
is an
application
of criticism which may
be
called literary criticism and
another which may be called political criticism. To recognize in the
latter procedures familiar to discussions of literature is neither to "over–
value" literature nor to "undervalue" politics. All the texts of our ex–
perience are open to explication, and the healthy function of critical
analysis is to understand, appreciate and judge the structures of pas–
sionate intention which all behavior - in extremely diversified ways–
both proposes and conceals.
l
!
