Re: Look



On Sun, 28 Jan 1996, Babette Babich wrote:

> To Tomm Blancato
>

Ostensibly, my "bad reading" is to justify your misspelling my name. That
would be a kind of punishment, I suppose. Or a typo (I doubt it). If you
had read, well, not Heidegger, but perhaps something else, you might have
considered that a compliance brought about by the coercion of the threat,
be it a compliance to your reading or to some standard of reading, etc.,
of being somehow "disrecognized"/misrecognized has the problematic
character which the punitive mentality usually creates. Such a
misrecognition, of course, is not a physical violence. But Heidegger can
teach us that what is important is the *essence* of what is violent.



> It should not be lost on you, even after your overlong and stunningly
> limited post, that by titling your comment "Look" you very nicely
> betrayed the true source of your reading/comprehension of Heidegger
> in none other than Jean-Paul Sartre.

This is presumptuous.


You can find the kind of authenticity
> in love in Sartre, only it remains a sight truer to the comlexities
> of lived authenticity as, in Sartre and in de Beauvoir's reading and to
> use her terminology, it is shot through with ambiguity, all the way
> down and the choice one that must be made with every moment.

"Choice" is an interesting topic. "and the choice one that must be made
with every moment"...not clear. Do you mean: and the choice sight, the
choice one must make every moment? I don't know Sartre's and de Beauvoir's
readings. Do you refer to the choice that must be made again and again,
in Being and Time? Do you refer to the Sartrean "choice", that one
chooses their actions, and inactions, etc., all without any attributional
framework?


>
> Yet making this comment as I am now doing is an exercise in futility.
> You read Heidegger.
> You cam up with the tommy-twaddle you posted.

I'm sorry if you didn't like what I cam up with. I don't think it was
deserving of this kind of response, frankly. Do I get to say "Babby
babble" now? :)

>
> Understanding nuanced or complicated thoughts (or in this case
> suggestions) is not, evidently enough, your strong suit.

You are making a global generalization on the basis of one piece of
evidence. And you appear to be doing so maliciously. No, it is not
"evidently enough" at all. Understanding and releasing the play of
ambiguity comes, in part, from painstakingly recognizing the phemonenal
facts of the case, in this case, my case, to which a hasty attention and
polemic appears to be rather forcibly attaching itself. This painstaking
attention (and surely I do ask too much here, I admit) requires that we go
against our attempts to rush in with totalizing/generalizing
pronouncements and to see things in a way overdetermined by a given mood.
And, of course, my post was riddled with such pronouncement, or at least
questions. But it was not, however, as malicious as your response. In the
face of the daunting bodies of knowledge one faces, be it the requirements
for reading Heidegger, or the artful invocations of text an interlocutor
(if I can call this a conversation!) may not have read, and in the face of
a strange need which I believe obtains, to *make general statements* if
only, like a sketch, in order to retract or reformulate them, a certain
ambiguity, a very special one, I think, comes to the fore, if one "reads"
carefully. The ambiguity I refer here may be evident to you.


> And I am about to be zapped by the equal-opportunity-to-misconstrue-
> stuff-and-then-complain-about-incoherence contingent.

It is not clear to me that what I wrote is, in fact, so much a
miscontrual. One piece of evidence: I speak of the referentiality of the
work world with the home of the worker, a proceeding which does not seem
to develop in Heidegger in a satisfactory way. While, of course, he gives
a kind of nod to "being with others in the world", there remains, in his
series of examples, scarcely a single face, throughout his writing that I
know of. One piece of "equipment" that shows up in his later writing (I
forget where, this is an email discussion list and not a formal
colloquium) is "the table where the boys ate lunch, still bearing the
remains of their meal". Or else, the peasant woman's shoes in the OWA.
When these pieces of equipment are resurrected into their poetical
function, they still rarely lead to faces, let alone the rich, complex,
and dare I say, ambiguous play of family relationship, etc. The later
discussions of the "home" also seems to bear this trait. Rather, they tend
to point to either solitary walkers in darkness, anguished artists and
hymnal poets, etc.

I often think, when reading Heidegger closely, which I claim to have
actually done, with some necessary limitations, that Heidegger's
psychology and analysis of being in the world systematically chooses
examples which are less ambiguous: fear (as representative of all
emotions, by some proposed but undeveloped extension), anxiety (as that
ecstatic Being which does not involve a worlded complex), guilt as the
means by which Dasein gets a kind of "secondary"/cool read of it's
standing in the world, all as opposed to the hot, erotic, diverse, ethical
conditions which, in fact, obtain proximally and for the most part for any
but the most isolated Dasein. While not derivative, fear is still a less
primary state of mind for Dasin, while "love" and "sexual attraction" and
"wanting things", "wanting to make mommy proud", "impress someone one is
attracted to", "wrestling with a dog on the floor for hours", "a family
holiday", "going to a funeral" appear to be quite central. It is
presumptuous to think that the structure of the various states of mind of
these other things can either be modeled after fear (the insights about
which Heidegger makes are of course very good) or, as concerns
responsibility, be laid open properly through the analysis of guilt.
Rather, it appears that a certain parallel to the avoidance of ambiguous
phenomena which can be found in cognitive psychology (where hot cognition
is avoided in favor of "cool" cognition) or of course behavioral
psychology seems also to obtain in Heidegger. That Heidegger can then
extend the kind of existential skeleton he develops to the full limits of
its possibilities (i.e., being toward death) does not militate against the
question as to how a full-blown existential analytic would develop were
its bases not to be truncated as they appear to be in Heidegger.

While I am obviously painting this picture in broad strokes, the
connection I made at the end of my fateful post to social issues, etc.,
has to do with the general complex of issues concerning a tendency to take
diverse social phenomena and reduce them to simpler arenas, and in such a
way that these arenas sternly foreclose admission of their own nature as
*stylistic* in favor of a kind of absolute securing of *points* or
"touchdowns"... This can be seen very clearly in the political discourse
concerning the prison system and the strange bad faith that that becomes
apparent (look for yourself!) when one tries to balance the moral force
inherent in the commodified themes of "revolution" (the name of our new
local radio station here in Pittsburgh) and the "heros of social action"
(Saint Martin Luther King, Saint Gandhi, Saint Malcom X) with the death
counts and the apathy on the part of college students which is at a record
low (Washington Post, Jan 22-28 1996 weekly edition). And it can be seen
in those discourses and practices which subtend and inform the general
horizons of responsive action, which I say without substantiation here,
are, *in spite of everything*, of a restrictive punitive form and "forced
choice" politics.

>
> Banality rules.


I'm not sure my post was banal. Rather than first attempting a question
(even keeping in mind your worst suspicions of my bad scholarship and
horrendous thinking), you have immediately rushed in to pin my post to the
wall as yet another example of "banality".

One might do well to consider the disclosive character of mood. And of
course, one must "master one's mood" (Heidegger tells is, in a rather
simplistic fashion). I take it as my responsibility to attain to a mood of
a certain respect, a certain infinite possibility, when approaching a text
(I know, I know, "well it sure isn't evident from the drivel you wrote,
you, tommmy chommmy!") and only on that basis to launch into polemics or
satyagraha. And a "look" here means more than looking, but rather, a sense
of the founding *logos*, which lets be seen, of *dialogos*. In other
words, why not dialogue a little before launching into the kind of attack
you deploy here? I don't know the sense of "look" in Sartre, and rather
meant a simpler sense of bringing one's attention to something, or "think
about it".

I'll close yet another overly long post, and give some thanks for this
medium which allows longer statments, dialogue, etc. as opposed to the
tyrannically banal insistence on 2 minute sound bytes permeating politics
and the predominant state philosophies.

Regards and, to be honest, fear,

Tom


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Re: Look, Babette Babich
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