This didn't seem to post. My apologies if this is a repetition.
Tom B.
Michael wrote:
"So much on how get away from accusational and psychological readings of
Heidegger and his 'personal opionions'."
The question of violence to a text, as a subspecies of the question of
violence more generally, is not a mere matter of desubstantializing in the
direction of opinion and psychology. Heidegger actively encounters the
question of violence, in a kind of momentary good form, when he prepares
his own way to go against the thinking of western metaphysics. Or is it
good form? He does so in service to the question of Being, true, in a
kind of kindred spirit with other philosophers or thinkers caught in
semblances. Along the way, there must be some violence. A certain virility
of thought well articulated vis a vis violence generally in _Introduction
to Metaphysics_.
It won't do, prima facie, simply to suggest that Heidegger is never
violent *in a way which transgresses his own, our own, "the" standards of
adjudicated destruction.* Nor will your violent dismissal, which attempts
in too facile a way, to put off any and all critiques as mere opinion
fallen from the path of the question of Being, the unacceptable invocation
of the "who is speaking", or -- shudder -- as mere psychology.
And we can't say, I think, that Heidegger himself ever really raises the
question of violence, which complicates matters considerably. With regard
to the *question of violence* (and what really calls for thinking by the
time Heidegger has come along?), it seems to me that Heidegger circles
about his own essence, in coming across violence as something "in the
way", in an obtrusiveness which must be suffered and transcended
(adjudicated destruction), while in fact the whole path Heidegger
traverses, like that of Nietzsche, is permeated with a response to
violence. In the quest for Being, "man"/Dasein remains blind -- blinded
above all by what is most blinding: sight -- to his "essence":
nonviolence.
Does Heidegger "do violence" to Nietzsche? Derrida thinks so. He thinks
that Heidegger tears through Nietzsche, ingnoring Nietzsche's
italicizations and underlinings, ignoring the question of style. This is
plausible enough not to dismiss. But before such a critique is developed,
we remain fully in the *limits* of our own development of the question
*of violence*.
A thinking of the *question of violence* understands the issue of
*adjudicated violence*. But there are two modes in which this "progress of
violence", which is at the same time a progress of nonviolence, can
develop. Either thinking can "deal with violence as necessary", or else it
can stand in its moral-ethical condition *fully*. The thinking which
simply enters into the question of violence long enough to adjudicate a
"necessary violence" (and we know how well such logics of adjudicated
violence can be exploited, as in the case of the prolonged US embargos on
Iraq and Cuba) is a nonviolence which has not "found its legs". Precisely
because the simple adjudication of violence can simply sanction violence
(in the form of sanctions, for example), it is to be held in the
discipline of a certain restraint which exeeds the Heideggerian ethos
altogether. If what calls for thinking is understood properly, and I claim
that Heidegger did not heed this, above all, the question of nonviolence
is *not* one which one simply *uses* in order to "get on with things".
Nor should we suggest that this question of violence, and its
implications, are without ontological purchase. Just as Heidegger must
rethink metaphysics, or prethink or otherwise go beyond them, into the
"other thinking", so to must he, or we, rethink the very assumptions about
the elementality of violence in, say, the Heraclitean sense. Only the
thinking along the path of nonviolence, which can never be simply a
"thinking", can point the way and make sure the footings for these issues.
Tom B.
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"No civilized society can thrive upon victims whose humanity has been
permanently mutilated." -- Rabindranath Tagore
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