'Where's it coming from?'

I remember, some years ago, a well-attended seminar at Oxford given by a fairly senior academic, Dr X. It was on colonial discourse. Afterwards a number of questions followed, including one from an American graduate student that was heavily critical. The criticisms were in no way ‘personal’ but were certainly articulated with some force. Dr X did not address them directly. He replied instead as follows: “I’m detecting quite a lot of hostility in what you’re saying, and I’m just wondering where that hostility is coming from.” He said this with an air of almost irenic enquiry or gentle concern.

But precisely this position of enunciation, this irenic enquiry, is not a possible one. Its clinical (in both senses) denial of the argument offered, deliberate non-recognition, patronising concern, assumed luxury of detachment – all compose a position of power that refuses to speak its name.

Incidentally, nor are ‘hostility’ and the argument necessarily dissociable. In other words, far from the argument being ‘motivated’ by hostility (and just a kind of mask for this hostility) it is, or can be, equally true that the hostility (read passion) is motivated by the argument. And it is worth pointing out too that we can indeed have a passionate interest (the canard of ‘disinterested truth’ is an academic fiction) in getting to the truth, rather than this passion automatically feeding the prosecution case, whether that case be couched in academicising or psychologising banalities.