Mitch,
The last point conerning the firing squad was very interesting (as were
your other comments). This reminds me of a book by a woman named Delbo
called, I think, Memoirs of Auschwitz. She spoke of how people in the
camps died, how hard it was to explain to loved ones that the last words
uttered were not profound, but were rather often things like "Well, I'm
about to kick the bucket." This shows up just how far from reaching a
proper...um, let me say, ontological understanding the matter of killing
is from "death" in a thoughtful and "human" sense. In this sense, the
deprivation of the camps shows up very strongly, in that these people
were not only killed by were, at the same time, deprived of their own death.
This issue, as I have allowed it to insinuate itself in my last couple of
posts, seems to me to be very important: the status of the "life and death
circumstance" in relationship to, as Heidegger puts it, "thinking death as
death"...and at the same time relates, or, rather, needs to be related to
the current (is the Holocaust still current? I think so) tendencies to
fetishize and pornographize, to "arenaize" or "spectacularize" the life
and death circumstance, usually for the sake of a certain logic of
victory. From the Baywatch TV show's "life-saving gesture" which
*eliminates* the need for the "soft" work of actually working things out
(the drowing victim brings us all together, we remember ourselves and now
magicallky know how to love and rise above our problems, out of a
fallennes into, not the "they" but some kind of petty squabbling and
jealousy), to the pornography of COP's shows, and the strange tendency for
gang members to repeatedly use the word "reality" when interviewed on talk
shows, to the way in which the life-death power of death is exploited by
politicians, not out of a *real undertanding of the significance of life
and death* but out of a short-term reactionary strategy in search of
political victory that is not too old for the next election, we seem to be
in the grips, the mancepts of a certain regime of death, one which needs
consideration. At issue is not the versus: it is not to say: Love! not
Death!, nor, as the popular song says, "love is stronger than justice"
(and it is more than a popular song that pushes this view), which is, of
course, to say that the sheer pitting of one thing against another is
strongest of all (the father of all...) but rather the thinkability of
death and love, and the capicity for Dasein (I dare say) to come to an
authentic understanding in the face of all the tendency to cheapen,
capitalize, pornographize, arenaize, commodify, systematize, mechanize,
etc., death and the call of the Other.
Just some thoughts.
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
The last point conerning the firing squad was very interesting (as were
your other comments). This reminds me of a book by a woman named Delbo
called, I think, Memoirs of Auschwitz. She spoke of how people in the
camps died, how hard it was to explain to loved ones that the last words
uttered were not profound, but were rather often things like "Well, I'm
about to kick the bucket." This shows up just how far from reaching a
proper...um, let me say, ontological understanding the matter of killing
is from "death" in a thoughtful and "human" sense. In this sense, the
deprivation of the camps shows up very strongly, in that these people
were not only killed by were, at the same time, deprived of their own death.
This issue, as I have allowed it to insinuate itself in my last couple of
posts, seems to me to be very important: the status of the "life and death
circumstance" in relationship to, as Heidegger puts it, "thinking death as
death"...and at the same time relates, or, rather, needs to be related to
the current (is the Holocaust still current? I think so) tendencies to
fetishize and pornographize, to "arenaize" or "spectacularize" the life
and death circumstance, usually for the sake of a certain logic of
victory. From the Baywatch TV show's "life-saving gesture" which
*eliminates* the need for the "soft" work of actually working things out
(the drowing victim brings us all together, we remember ourselves and now
magicallky know how to love and rise above our problems, out of a
fallennes into, not the "they" but some kind of petty squabbling and
jealousy), to the pornography of COP's shows, and the strange tendency for
gang members to repeatedly use the word "reality" when interviewed on talk
shows, to the way in which the life-death power of death is exploited by
politicians, not out of a *real undertanding of the significance of life
and death* but out of a short-term reactionary strategy in search of
political victory that is not too old for the next election, we seem to be
in the grips, the mancepts of a certain regime of death, one which needs
consideration. At issue is not the versus: it is not to say: Love! not
Death!, nor, as the popular song says, "love is stronger than justice"
(and it is more than a popular song that pushes this view), which is, of
course, to say that the sheer pitting of one thing against another is
strongest of all (the father of all...) but rather the thinkability of
death and love, and the capicity for Dasein (I dare say) to come to an
authentic understanding in the face of all the tendency to cheapen,
capitalize, pornographize, arenaize, commodify, systematize, mechanize,
etc., death and the call of the Other.
Just some thoughts.
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---