Published by Crackers Books, 28 January 2024
What does it mean to be a scholar?[1]
Werner Bonefeld[2]
What does it mean to be a scholar? It does not mean to please power.
Scholarship is not meant to confirm existing powers. It’s meant to question power. It’s meant to tell truth to power.
Scholarship is not meant to legitimize existing condition. It is meant to understand, to comprehend this condition whatever it costs for itself. It is to tell the truth to power, to domination.
Scholarship is the dignity of thought, I’m afraid, it goes to the root of the matter. And the root of the matter can only be the human being herself not power for the sake of power, of money for the sake of more money.
Scholarship concerns itself with human social relations and their conditions.
Scholarship is political critique. It is social critique. And it is economic critique.
It is critique of the existing human condition regardless and in the face of political power and the demands, requirements of that power.
Scholarship is not meant to please power. It is meant to dissolve it in thought.
Scholarship recognizes humanity as a purpose and thus rejects the idea of humanity as a means for the few at the disposal of the few. It articulates what it has established as truth and it does reject and it does rejects/opposes and criticizes existing untruth.
Scholarship is enlightenment and therewith critique of darkness.
Scholarship asks why does this content take that form? Why does the content of human social reproduction take the form of money as more money, of power for the sake of power? Why does it take the form of war?
You would remember, Galileo, at his time he established that the world is round. It was in direct contradiction to the then powers who said the world is flat. It paid a high price for its courage, insight, freedom of thought. He ended up in jail. The world, however, really is round. War is not peace and humanity is not a means at the disposal of the few. It is a purpose.
The persecution of scholarship makes clear that the demand for peace imperils the peaceful.
[1] Original video can access from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvQNHmOGFD4 [7 December 2017]
Transcribed by Watcharabon Buddharaksa and Mehmet Erman Erol
Watcharabon Buddharaksa is an Associate Professor in Politics, Naresuan University, Thailand
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tuyTDwcAAAAJ&hl=en
Mehmet Erman Erol is a Lecturer in International Relations, De Montfort University, UK
https://www.dmu.ac.uk/about-dmu/academic-staff/art-design-humanities/mehmet-erol/mehmet-erman-erol.aspx
[2] Werner Bonefeld was a Professor of Politics at the University of York, in the United Kingdom. He sent this message in solidarity with the academics and scholars in Turkey.
