The limits of dialogue: Affective constraints and situational intellectualism

Abstract

This response to Sari Hanafi's call for dialogical sociology interrogates the affective, relational, and situational constraints that often inhibit the dialogue he advocates. While broadly sympathetic to Hanafi's critique of symbolic liberalism, I argue that his normative model underestimates the emotional and social forces that shape intellectual engagement, particularly in moments of trauma, polarisation, and moral saturation. Drawing on my own concept of situational intellectualism, I identify four key constraints (affective attachments, the social cost of nuance, trauma, and the temporality of critique) which limit the viability of dialogical openness. Rather than positioning these forces as failures of ethical courage or rationality, I propose that they be understood as constitutive features of intellectual labour. Situational intellectualism offers a framework for assessing how, when, and under what conditions dialogue becomes possible, without idealising its absence or instrumentalising its form.

Hanafi's (2025) article, part of a broader critique of what he terms ‘symbolic liberalism’, offers a sharp and timely reflection on political polarisation and the growing difficulty of sustaining pluralism in morally saturated academic contexts. His vision of dialogical sociology, grounded in humility, mutual recognition and openness to opposing perspectives, offers an important provocation at a time when both freedom of expression and standards of accountability are under strain (see also Al Azmeh and Baert, 2025).

While I find Hanafi's diagnosis of the challenges facing academic pluralism compelling, I find myself increasingly concerned that the epistemic categories and analytical tools we are operating with are so lacking in honest reflexivity, that the dialogical model he proposes will only work if we seek a deeper understanding of the contingencies that shape ethico-political positions and how we express them relationally, contextually and situationally in various forms of intellectual interventions and daily interactions. In other words, I am suggesting that for the dialogical approach to work, we need to first ‘problem-space’ ¹ (Scott, 1999, 2004) the role of universities and of the intellectual to begin with (see also Al Azmeh and Dillabough, 2024). Indeed, the dialogical model, as Hanafi currently presents it, rests on a set of assumptions about agency and affect that are not always available to intellectuals offering situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988) while managing their own affective attachments, political (and sometimes existential) threats, traumatic encounters and communal expectations.

In what follows, I argue that four forces in particular inhibit the kind of dialogical engagement Hanafi calls for, and it is only in naming, acknowledging and confronting them that any move towards a dialogical ideal can become tenable. These forces or obstacles are:

affective attachments to formative ideologies, which can constrain the reach of critique even when one's intellectual alignment has matured and evolved;

the social cost of nuance, including the perception of betrayal that often accompanies deviation from one's moral or political community;

trauma, which renders certain forms of dialogue and/or nuance not merely uncomfortable but psychically or politically intolerable; and

the temporality of dialogue.

These obstacles are not anomalies or failures of courage but constitutive attributes of the emotional and relational complexities people navigate within and outside the academy. The proposed notion of a ‘situational intellectualism’, I suggest, in the second part of this repsonse offers a generative framework to interpret these dilemmas not as lapses in reason, objectivity or even morality, but as relational and contextual judgements that shape intellectual interventions, even if they are rarely acknowledged or named as such. By ‘situational intellectualism’, I refer to a versatile mode of intellectual positioning (Baert, 2012) that responds dynamically to the historical moment, political context and relational costs of speech, rather than adhering to fixed norms of neutrality or to the powerful motivations afforded by political commitments.

Affective attachments

Even when intellectuals no longer subscribe to a particular ideology, cultural affinity or worldview, the residual emotional force of early socialisation can shape the limits of critique. Certain ideas, practices or figures are protected from scrutiny not because they are intellectually persuasive but because they are affectively familiar. This may apply to religious traditions, political ideologies, experiential proximities (e.g., between people of a certain race or class) or even the symbolic structures of national belonging.

These attachments complicate the assumption that ethico-political positioning is simply a matter of rational distance or epistemic rigour. They reveal that affective attachments can turn into epistemic attachments (Bacevic, 2023). Some commitments persist as emotional sanctuaries, buffered from the sharper edges of critical engagement. And even where this affective protectiveness is kept in check by a conscious commitment to academic rigor, universal values of justice or an aspirational (always aspirational) ideal of objectivity, it thwarts the possibility of sharing findings or expressing observations that align with or serve a narrative or sub-narrative or even an infra-political constellation within the camp deemed as enemy to the object of one's affective attachment. In such cases, dialogue with ideological others may falter not from hatred or dogmatism but from a more subtle fear of disorientation or emotional rupture. Hanafi's framework risks underestimating the internal resistances that block dialogical openness, even among those who are committed in principle to plurality.

This tension between intellectual positioning and social belonging is neither new nor exceptional. Tocqueville's reflections on American democracy and intellectuals more broadly reveal a subtle yet sustained alignment with his aristocratic, Catholic and militarised worldview: even as he praised democratic institutions, he feared the levelling effects of equality on independent thought and upheld the need for a moral elite shaped by religious tradition and civic virtue (Ikuta, 2022). Even those who take bold stances in some contexts may become hesitant or resistant in others. Syrian poet Adonis, for instance, strongly supported revolutionary movements in Tunisia and Egypt and had long championed intellectual freedom across the Arab world. Yet he vocally opposed the Syrian revolution once the Assad regime was threatened. While his critiques of Islamism were cited as the official reason, many perceived this shift as shaped by his Alawite background, revealing the subtle entanglement of affective identity and political positioning (Salameh, 2012). Hanafi's own normative stance maps closely onto his social position. Indeed, if even Weber (2002 [1905]) – the father of ‘value-free sociology’ – ultimately grounded his valorisation of Protestant rationality in the very cultural dispositions of his own class and milieu, then the problem is not individual inconsistency but the structural difficulty of thinking entirely against the grain of one's formative affinities.

The social cost of nuance

In highly polarised contexts, intellectuals who express ambivalence, sympathy for opposing views or even internally directed critique may find themselves cast as traitors. This is not simply a matter of reputational risk. What is at stake is often a deeper sense of social belonging, particularly in contexts where identity, solidarity and moral clarity are bound together. Speaking critically from within one's community can result in ostracism, disidentification or even public denouncement. As a result, many choose silence or rhetorical overstatement not because they lack the tools of dialogue but because they anticipate the social tax it will incur.

This phenomenon is well known in both activist and academic circles. It is not simply a matter of free speech being curtailed by external powers but of internal boundaries being policed in the name of loyalty. The cost of nuance is often relational: a loss of trust, belonging or symbolic capital within one's own camp. Even mild departures from dominant group sentiment can trigger disproportionate backlash. Hannah Arendt, for example, was fiercely attacked for her report on the Eichmann trial – not only by ideological opponents but by long-standing peers and allies – precisely because she refused to perform the expected affective and moral posture. Hanafi's dialogical sociology calls for courage and openness but it does not fully attend to the price of that courage when the consequence is social and emotional estrangement from one's community.

While there have been many attempts to construct the social imaginary around the figure of the intellectual as a principled outsider or marginal non-belonger, it is equally important to rehumanise intellectual workers within and beyond the academy. If we are to fully understand the causes of polarisation and the limits of dialogicality in the contemporary university, we must account for the emotional, relational and institutional pressures that shape how intellectuals navigate loyalty, dissent and social risk.

Trauma and the temporality of dialogue

Trauma, including collective and intergenerational trauma, introduces a different kind of constraint. In moments of historic, recent or ongoing injury, the demand for dialogue can feel not only premature but also violent. When narratives of suffering are still forming, when moral outrage is not yet metabolised into analysis, the pressure to accommodate opposing views may feel like a betrayal of the self or the community.

In a reading group I participated in, we read Susan Abulhawa's Against a Loveless World (2021) shortly after reading Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer (2015). I initially found Abulhawa's portrayal of the Palestinian struggle lacking in moral complexity compared to Nguyen's account of Vietnam. But I quickly realised that the temporality of critique matters: Nguyen had the benefit of decades of historical distance, while Abulhawa was writing into an ongoing trauma. The same expectation of nuance could not apply.

This is also observable within a single intellectual's situational adjustments of tone and positionality. A compelling illustration comes from Judith Butler's responses following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. In the immediate aftermath, Butler published an article in the London Review of Books, unequivocally condemning the killings, describing them as ‘a terrifying and revolting massacre’ and ‘a moral failure of enormous proportions’ (Butler, 2023). She emphasised universal grievability and urged mourning that did not serve nationalist exclusion. This tone was received by some Palestinian intellectuals as overly restrained, especially in light of Butler's long-standing critique of Zionism. By contrast, in a later intervention at a roundtable in Pantin on 3 March 2024, Butler referred to the 7 October attacks as ‘an act of armed resistance’, a characterisation that stirred intense controversy and was widely reported in the press (Le Monde, 2024a, 2024b). This rhetorical shift, from describing the events as morally indefensible to recognising them as politically legible resistance, demonstrates how intellectual responses are shaped not only by abstract principle but by timing, affective pressure, shock and the political context of speech. Butler's case exemplifies what I have called situational intellectualism: the affective and relational calibration of public intervention according to what the moment seems to demand, allow or endure.

A similar consideration shaped this very response to Hanafi. While I might disagree with some of the finer political points he raised, I felt that the current moment, and the pain we are all experiencing in relation to Israel's catastrophic assault on Palestinians, required a different kind of engagement. This, too, was a judgement shaped by my own injuries in relation to atrocities committed in Syria and resulting in affective proximity: not a failure of critique but an effort to honour the ethical demands of timing.

Situational intellectualism

What I call situational intellectualism is both an observation and an invitation. It names the tacit logic many intellectuals already follow as they modulate their interventions based on political context, emotional charge and relational risk. It also proposes that we become more conscious of this calibration and more accountable for the judgements it entails. This affective and relational calibration is rarely named, although recent work has begun to document it empirically within academic life (e.g., Leyton and Sánchez, 2024).

Situational intellectualism does not oppose dialogue but insists that dialogue must be timed, situated and ethically earned. This call for more conscious calibration echoes a growing body of work across disciplines that already takes situational nuance seriously; from anthropological engagements with contradiction (Berliner et al., 2017) to autoethnographic accounts of critique under affective pressure (Leyton and Sánchez, 2024). It recognises that critique, silence, ambiguity and confrontation all have their place, and that what is generative in one moment may be harmful or incoherent in another. It calls not for purity or expressive courage but for relational discernment: a willingness to ask not only what we believe but what the moment can bear.

Conclusion

Hanafi is right to call for a more dialogical, less reactive intellectual culture. But any such culture must be built on a realistic understanding of the affective, social and temporal conditions that shape intellectual labour. The obstacles to dialogue are not always external or ideological. They are often intimate: structured by loyalty, proximity to harm and the fear of abandonment. Situational intellectualism offers a framework for acknowledging these conditions without succumbing to paralysis. It invites us to remain accountable not only to our principles but to the emotional and political worlds in which those principles are made to matter.

Hanafi's call for dialogical sociology rooted in normative reflexivity and empirical rigour is both timely and commendable. However, it is noteworthy, and unsurprising, that his own engagement with the Gaza case, while ethically compelling, aligns with the affective attachments and moral commitments he expresses elsewhere. This congruence between social belonging and normative stance, while understandable, raises the question of whether the dialogical ideal he outlines is fully achievable – even by its most eloquent proponents.