Discussion or diagnosis? Where fascism begins

The enemy of art, and freedom, in our time is diagnosis.  This is when what someone is doing, refers to the way that they are as an individual, rather than to the matter of what they are talking about or otherwise involved in or directed towards.  Then, the way they are as an individual, or personality, is not affirmed but criticized, and criticized in a manner that is not contingent but absolute as far as they are concerned.  There is something wrong with them.  Something is wrong, and it is you.  You are the problem.  Therefore, you need to be either corrected or eliminated.  Eliminated either relatively (prisons and hospitals: some form of detention, perhaps indefinite but with re-entry into “society” remaining a possibility) or absolutely (Auschwitz and its cognates; being killed with impunity, such as by the police, or some vigilante).  

There is something about any genuine thinking that is intrinsically social and not individual. Its problems are not given to it but formed by a work of problematization that the thinking itself realizes. The non-given character of true problems in the work of thinking is such that targeting individuals who seem to represent the problem always turns away from what needs to be thought to adopt instead a posture of making right, ‘solving’ the problem in terms that are given through what may aptly be termed a ‘correctional procedure’ that targets the objects represented by one of those terms, usually some persons, and in ways that befit legal proceedings rather than a philosophical and necessarily social or sociological thinking. Technique and strategy are useful for solving problems; something else is needed to address situations we find ourselves in that seem problematic. This means the problem and the thinker are not externally related, and guilt and innocence therefore cease to be relevant concepts. What is most useful and needed may be the discussion of art works or discussion of social phenomena aimed at criticizing the society itself that the critic is part of, rather than someone who is in the wrong, as in projects of revenge or their modernized form in legal proceedings. If all our most serious social problems were the fault of some individuals, who can be accused, tried, convicted, and made to pay, then there would be no need for philosophy but only law, no need for politics but only law enforcement, no society with the res publicae or matters of public concern that distinguish republics from dictatorships modeled on corporations and the military. Social problems would be attributed to crime or some analogue of it, like a disease causing social disorder and occurring, naturally and inevitably, in certain persons. Mental illness is the paradigm of such disease, and its usefulness as metaphor is built in since in some ways it is already metaphorical. Drawing its guiding metaphors from medicine, that is how the Third Reich understood not only the Jews but all of society and politics, on a medical model aimed at not only national security but a purification.