From “Fighting Words:”

I want to switch now to a different mise en scene: an academic conference, where a woman is giving a paper. It is an attack on another woman’s recent book; the entire paper is devoted to demolishing it, and the speaker is doing a superb job. The audience has begun to catch the spirit of the paper, which is witty, elegant, pellucid, and razor sharp; they appreciate the deftness, the brilliance, the grace, with which the assassination is being conducted; the speaker’s intelligence flatters their intelligence, her taste becomes their taste, her principles their principles. They start to laugh at the jokes. They are inside the paper now, pulling with the speaker, seeing her victim in the same way she does, as the enemy, as someone whose example should be held up to scorn because her work is pernicious and damaging to the cause. (For my purposes here, it doesn’t matter what the cause is, what the speaker was right about, or what sins the victim was guilty of.)

Listening to the paper, which I admired very much for the performance values I’ve mentioned, I began to feel more and more uncomfortable. The more the audience pulled with the speaker, the more I shrank away. The sensation I felt was fear. I was afraid that this woman might someday turn her attack on me—indeed, in one of her devastating sideswipes, I thought I had already been anonymously grazed by her dagger—and I imagined the audience, which only the day before had enthusiastically applauded my own presentation, turning on me like a pack of dogs. By the time the paper was over, I felt as if I had been present at a ritual execution of some sort, something halfway between a bullfight, where the crowd admires the skill of the matador and enjoys the triumph over the bull, and a public burning, where the crowd witnesses the just punishment of a criminal. For the academic experience combined the elements of admiration, bloodlust, and moral self-congratulation.