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PARTISAN REVIEW
Edith Kurzweil:
Thank you. Hans Magnus Enzensberger will be our
last speaker.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger:
My remarks are going to sound like a
footnote to what Dubravka has said. They are about the production of
hatred. In the climate of an academic culture where it is considered po–
litically correct to be politically correct, to speak about the production
of hatred may seem redundant. Great efforts are obviously being made in
American universities to do away with all manner of discrimination. I am
not sure whether deep social problems can be resolved by means of new
curricula or by revisions of protocol and semantic etiquette. But then it
is certainly not for the outsider to pass judgment on a matter so
exquisitely American in its character.
The reflections I should like to offer come from a very different
background . Whenever intellectuals are discussing intellectuals, which is
one of their favorite occupations, a certain bias is inevitable. It is not
that a serious debate of this kind is a mere exercise in self-congratulation;
on the contrary, self-irony and self-doubt arc very much in evidence, and
there are cases when the mood borders on the masochistic. All the same,
there is always an air of exclusivity about gatherings like the present one.
A minimum of respectability is necessary in order
to
be invited. This is
even clearer in the rare instances when there is something to be cele–
brated. Eastern Europe has furnished us with many admirable examples of
courageous intellectuals, and some of the participants at our conference
have come close to being the heroes of the past decade, though such an
outcome was, of course, not what they were after. More clearly than on
many other occasions I can remember, the bad guys are not amongst us,
and they are not likely to be talked about very much.
I am not sure that this is all
to
the good. In other walks of life, like
engineering or insurance, there is a mode of analysis called the worst-case
scenario. If we want to consider the risks of our trade, it might be
worthwhile to try our hands at something of the sort. This is why I
should like to take a brief look at an interesting figure: the intellectual as
a hate-monger. Of course, I cannot hope to do justice
to
such a rich
subject. A vast anthology could be put together to prove that point, a
sort of album of mug shots of the intelligentsia, and perhaps one day
some intrepid editor will do it.
It is true that such an anthology would hardly make good reading.
Many of the faces which would appear in the collection would not
qualify if we were looking for outstanding achievement. But let us re–
member that whatever definition of the intellectual we might bring to
