“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
(Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 1946. Schocken edition 1976, p. 13).
What Sartre says here applies to others — alt-righters and pomo lefties, for example, who use rhetoric the same way — because the same general psychology is at work. They’ve imagined and projected a mythic enemy (a Jew, a Globalist, a Capitalist), and it’s that mythic abstraction that they both attack and define themselves against.
The abstraction they’re fighting doesn’t actually exist, so the particular individuals they’re trolling are mis-understood and straw-manned, and the conversation goes nowhere.
The againstness comes to form their core identity. Consequently there’s no real person there for anyone to respond to. They have little-to-no actual self, and feel a glimmer of being something only in generating reactions from others to their poking and trolling.
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