Correlating coherent symbolic structures, or language, with the social inequalities of theestablished order, many modern thinkers have tended to take an activist stance towardslanguage, designating it as insidiously violent in its maintenance of unjust difference andcoercive deferral of action. Taking up the question of why contemporary theory so closelyassociates violence and language, Gans cites the modern criticism of the binary hierarchiesimplicated in the events leading up to the Holocaust. As an example of this tendency, hereferences Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, which claims that, in the long term, therhetoric of the voluble eighteenth-century French revolutionary Jacques Hébert preparesthe way for the violence of Stalin’s totalitarian rhetoric (“Ecriture” para. 8). In hisassessment of Hébert, Barthes suggests that the legacy of activist rhetoric reverberatesthrough history, contributing to an upheaval which would ultimately assist in establishingthe very tyranny revolutionaries sought to depose.
展开▼
