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need looking
to
rather than the linguistic conventions. The problem,
in other words, may lie not in our conventions, or in the epistemol–
ogy that undergirds them, but in what they are being used to do.
Again, the same conventions may legitimate very different forms of
sociopolitical order-indeed, they seem to have done so.
If
conven–
tions of logic have been traduced by centuries of misappropriation
for coercive purposes, that doesn't mean we can divest ourselves of
these conventions without running into blind alleys of self-contradic–
tion, self-irony, self-recrimination, and selective abrogation of the
law of noncontradiction. Instead of contorting ourselves by "putting
in question" conventions we all rely on, we might do better to look
for ways of reappropriating these conventions for egalitarian rather
than manipulative purposes.
Foucault, having anticipated this argument, gives it an elo–
quently contemptuous name: "the politics of inverted commas."
If
we argue that Lyndon Johnson, when he invited us to "reason
together" about Vietnam while bombing that country, was invoking
not reason but
it
travesty of "reason," we are practicing the politics
of inverted commas and thus dignifying the strategies of social con–
trol. Similarly (and this is the context in which Foucault specifically
discusses the politics of inverted commas), if we argue that the idea
of socialism needs to be rescued from the brutalized" socialism" of
Stalin and the Gulag, we are again rationalizing oppression. (Here,
interestingly, Foucault's argument coincides with that of current
neoconservatives.) To be sure, the politics of inverted commas has
much to answer for on both sides of the global division of power, but
is there a real alternative?
If
our concepts are assumed to have been
discredited by their social and historical misappropriation, what is
left to us
to
do our critical thinking with?
To reject Foucau lt 's argument is not to refuse to put reason or
universalism "in question," nor to ignore the problem of ethnocen–
trism; it's merely to recognize the limits within which any self-cri–
tique must operate. Self-criticism depends on norms, rules, and
standards of judgment-regulating what counts as a fact, as evi–
dence, as proof, as relevant argument-on which it can't simply
choose
not
to rely. Again, as Derrida points out against Foucault,
those who seek to secede from the normative vocabulary turn out to
rely on that vocabulary in their gestures of secession. Derrida sees
that secession from our system of intelligibility would be unintelligi–
ble, so he settles for the next best thing: while conceding the neces-
