14 Are you trying to do something new by writing a book as an interview?
Theoretically speaking, there is nothing novel in this. The history of philosophy depends on the ongoing, invisible dialogues between the thinker and his interlocutors. One of Herbert Marcuse’s best books is fueled by the sections included after every essay. These sections are structured as interviews in which he interrogates himself and takes his own thoughts to task. Jean-Luc Nancy has done something similar, only with an invented interlocutor that resembles a different part of himself.
I’m intrigued by the self that exists in disagreement. Or maybe I’m playing with the form that serves as a bedrock of the U.S. justice system, namely, the courtroom interrogation, a civil procedure rooted in the assumption that speech, and speech-acts, can deliver that elusive ideal known as “justice.”
If justice depends on interpreting the evidence in a particular manner, then the legal process of the courtroom depends on maintaining the silences of what is left excluded. For example, let’s say that I was called to serve as a witness in a jury case. On the stand, my abortion would likely be excluded from the trial proceedings. The prosecutor wouldn’t be permitted to bring up this aspect of my personal life; the defendant’s attorney would say the witness’s character is being put on trial. We assume that the events of the witness’s private life have no bearing on the question of justice involved in the trial. But is this true? Since the human fetus has been granted personhood and abortion has been criminalized by the state of Alabama, is that part of my past still irrelevant to the production of justice?
My abortion is no longer a private act: the state has rendered it a public act by criminalizing it. Like in Ceaușescu’s Romania (an atheist dictatorship), my abortion is not personal to me but rather, a thing that the state is permitted to take personally. Can a witness who is guilty of a crime against the state be taken seriously on the stand? Can she be involved in any sort of justice that Alabama courts purport to offer?
Interviews allow to seed the gaps and score the silences. An interview is like a map of what is missing, what the speaker is avoiding.
