Iain,
I notice that in some places you feel the need to put the word "violence"
in quotation marks. You refer in particular to the Gadamerian
(/Heideggerian) sense of violence in interpretation that goes beyond the
author's own acts of meaning as presented in writing. What about these
quotation marks? They say, "well, not really *real* violence, but in a
*way*, violence". Not only because in the condition of writing, the
writer is removed form the text, is potentially less vulnerable to
attacks and misappropriation, depending on the setting, than in the
proximity of speech, but because to take the business of *interpretation*
(which already denotes a considerable posture of respect) as violenty
means to recognize a violence so ubiquitous that it hardly seems
meaningful to call it violence. And not only ubiquitous, but also "mild
in its effects". I'm drawing a great deal out of your quotation marks,
and I hope you'll forgive me for disrespecting your alterity and
intentions, if I do so, for the moment.
I'm pointing to a general phenomenon in the question of violence: that a
certain destructiveness inherent in things is thought to constitutes
violence. In the Jain religion, an old Indian offshoot of Hinduism, the
sense of *himsa* is to include the violence to plants by stepping on them,
of bugs eating bugs, etc., while the practice of the vow of ahimsa is to
involve stepping on bugs and such as little as possible. In Derrida,
there is a kind of violence in interpretation, one that must be *handled,
recognized*, and above all kept from totalizing away the alterity of the
"text" (a word that is thrown around too much, and also which, when used
too easily, really occuldes Derrida's meaning). This violence is
*recognized* and framed in a minimization schema: as little as possible.
The mode of Being which fulfils this requirement is speech/dialogue, I
think (in Derrida, I think this is in _Violence and Metaphysic_).
Ok, so this is what I call "naive nonviolence". Non-naive nonviolence
makes a distinction between *destruction* and *violence*. I'm not going
to get into the implications of this for Heideggerian "Destruktion" for
the now (and I'm not as equipped as others on this list to do so!) In the
case of bugs, of plants falling on and crushing other plants, what does
it mean to call this violence? It is a destruction, but not a violence.
In the various moments of interpretion (that is not pure exegis), how
much of this should be taken as *violence* proper rather than simply
*destruction*, "roughness", etc. This is certainly not *easy*, since the
*intentional* component (and nowhere does the issue of intention surface
more forcefully than in the question of violence) of dialogue and reading
is much more intrinsic to things. It may be that such oridinary violence
of interpretation is so primordial an intentional violence that it is out
of the purview of any meaninful attribution of "violence" as such.
Primordial strife, perhaps. So, again, "violence" flutters in quotation
marks in and out of the discourse, like a moth toward a light it can not
reach.
Nonviolence maintains itself in the *gravity* of the possibility of
violence. In interpretation, I take the "ordinary violence of
interpretation" to be mere destructiveness. When this destructiveness
*falls*, it falls into violence (and "violence" falls from its quotation
marks). This is a kind of original space of nonviolence which the question
concerning violence and nonviolence opens up. By clarifying this space, it
is possible for nonviolence to wrest (or weave) itself *out of* the
Hericlitean sense, which I might call "biolence". I would refer here,
then, to something like "true" violence, where true acts as a kind of
existential intensifier which marks a certain *standing*, *standing up
in*, thinking, thinking again, all of the earmarks of the "true" as
opposed to what simply "is" without question. The same goes for "essential
violence". There is, somehow, a *first moment* which is questioned in a
certain way. Biolence is of the "first moment", violence is of the second
moment. (But this is nothing other than going beyond the "first cut" of
interpretation, rather than basing a fruition of Being on a series of
"first cuts"/shapshots, etc.)
Ok, so there is in a way a *gravity* and a *range*. In a "falling" into
violence, there can be passages through things in various ways: passing
>from nonviolence, relative nonviolence, to destruction, on the one hand,
or to *adjudicated violence* on the other. Or, simply falling into
violence, or into the *biolence* of sheer "brutality", which seems to me
to be something short of "violence" per se. (Unless you want to try 14
year olds as adults...) Nonviolence *makes this distinction*, or rather,
these distinctions are *made in the world* and nonviolence disalienates
>from them by taking them up in itself. (Without such a "taking up",
violence and destruction have various moments according to actors and
recipients, but these are diffuse and not recognized and integrated into a
coherent thinking). Range and gravity denote some fundamentals of
*posture*, and I'm reminded here in particular of a Jain text in which a
kind of "beautiful standing" is noted to be one of the attributes of the
Jain ethos.
So I guess this all means that I think we have to read Heidegger,
Heracltus and Gadamer equipped with a distinction between *biolence* (as
the naive perception of violence) and *violence*/essential violence, and
try and figure out which they're doing and thinking. Again, to be clear,
a Heideggerian thinking can not think *essential violence* properly
unless it *embarks on the question of violence* in certain ways.
Tom B.
On Wed, 24 Jul 1996, Iain Thomson wrote:
> To Chris and other others:
> On Kampf/strife: When, in the context of his explication of the
> Heraclitean polemos, Heidegger translates the latter an 'unsprungliche
> Kampf' (In 1935's IM)--a primordial struggle which first gives rise to the
> contenders as such (Heidegger is on the way to a-letheia)--he is in part
> obliquely critiquing the cult of personality then centered around Hitler's
> Mein Kampf! Of course, it is the most dangerous possible strategy of
> critique, for by attempting to appropriate the language of the Nazis in
> order to move 'the movement' in another direction, he risked simply
> allowing his own language to be coopted by that movement in turn.
> (Lacoue-Labarthe's betrayal thesis--which he borrows from Blanchot--is thus
> too simple.)
> On Violence: In addition to the sense of violence described in B&T
> (doing violence to our ordinary conceptons in order to break-through to the
> temporal structure ontologically conditioning those conceptions), there are
> at least two other senses intended by those who say that Heidegger's
> Auseinandersetzungen are 'violent.' These two sense correspond with the
> two main brances of contemporary hermeneutics (which go back to the early
> and the later Heidegger, respectively).
> 1. The early-Heidegger/Gadamerian sense: readings are violent
> insofar as they refuse (implicitly or explicitly) to respect the
> self-conception of the author. But, as Gadamer credits Heidegger with
> having taught him, every interpretation is violent in this sense, for if
> the interpretation did not suppose that it had discovered some meaning in
> the text which the author had missed, then it would not be an
> *interpretation,* but only (the acolyte's dream of) a pure exegesis (which,
> were it possible, would be superfluous!). Freud's conception of the
> analysand's motivated self-deception ('miscognition') and Marx's critiques
> of 'false-consciousness' (being mistaken about the real sources of one's
> ideology) would fit in this category.
> 2. The later Heidegger/ Derridean sense (which stems from
> Heidegger directly and by way of Levinas): Derrida accepts and
> hyperbolozes the assumptions implicit in the Gadamerian view that every
> interpretation is violent, such that A). the author has no privileged
> access to the meaning of her text and B). since 'no context can determine
> maning to the point of exhaustiveness,' meaning necessarily excapes the
> textual parameters set up by the author to contain it. If the author is
> thus only the first reader in the open-ended discursive community within
> which the text becomes meaningful, then 'violence' in the Gadamerian sense
> is not only unavoidable but actually beneficial; it helps resist
> hypostasizing the author's authority and thereby closing off the potential
> meaningfulness of a text. Does this mean that for Derrida 'hermeneutic
> violence' is a toothless charge? No, for JD hermeneutic violence is the
> reader's failure to respect the alterity of the text. (Hence an 'ethics of
> reading.') This means that an interpretation, while picking up on what the
> author has forgotten, overlooked, etc., must be careful not to claim the
> completeness of its own interpretation.
> Here--under the influence of the later Heidegger--Derrida's
> textualization of ontology is quite apparent; as Heidegger thinks Being
> cannot be completely understood (or conceptually circumscribed) by any
> number of metaphysical interpretations, so Derrida holds that the text
> cannot be exhausted by any number of readings. [If Being is the sole
> 'positivity' in the later Heidegger's thinking (but a curious positivity
> that lends itself to 'negative theology'), then perhaps Heidegger is the
> sole positivity of Derrida's].
>
> Iain
>
>
>
>
> --- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>
_____________________________________________________________________
"No civilized society can thrive upon victims whose humanity has been
permanently mutilated." -- Rabindranath Tagore
_____________________________________________________________________
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
I notice that in some places you feel the need to put the word "violence"
in quotation marks. You refer in particular to the Gadamerian
(/Heideggerian) sense of violence in interpretation that goes beyond the
author's own acts of meaning as presented in writing. What about these
quotation marks? They say, "well, not really *real* violence, but in a
*way*, violence". Not only because in the condition of writing, the
writer is removed form the text, is potentially less vulnerable to
attacks and misappropriation, depending on the setting, than in the
proximity of speech, but because to take the business of *interpretation*
(which already denotes a considerable posture of respect) as violenty
means to recognize a violence so ubiquitous that it hardly seems
meaningful to call it violence. And not only ubiquitous, but also "mild
in its effects". I'm drawing a great deal out of your quotation marks,
and I hope you'll forgive me for disrespecting your alterity and
intentions, if I do so, for the moment.
I'm pointing to a general phenomenon in the question of violence: that a
certain destructiveness inherent in things is thought to constitutes
violence. In the Jain religion, an old Indian offshoot of Hinduism, the
sense of *himsa* is to include the violence to plants by stepping on them,
of bugs eating bugs, etc., while the practice of the vow of ahimsa is to
involve stepping on bugs and such as little as possible. In Derrida,
there is a kind of violence in interpretation, one that must be *handled,
recognized*, and above all kept from totalizing away the alterity of the
"text" (a word that is thrown around too much, and also which, when used
too easily, really occuldes Derrida's meaning). This violence is
*recognized* and framed in a minimization schema: as little as possible.
The mode of Being which fulfils this requirement is speech/dialogue, I
think (in Derrida, I think this is in _Violence and Metaphysic_).
Ok, so this is what I call "naive nonviolence". Non-naive nonviolence
makes a distinction between *destruction* and *violence*. I'm not going
to get into the implications of this for Heideggerian "Destruktion" for
the now (and I'm not as equipped as others on this list to do so!) In the
case of bugs, of plants falling on and crushing other plants, what does
it mean to call this violence? It is a destruction, but not a violence.
In the various moments of interpretion (that is not pure exegis), how
much of this should be taken as *violence* proper rather than simply
*destruction*, "roughness", etc. This is certainly not *easy*, since the
*intentional* component (and nowhere does the issue of intention surface
more forcefully than in the question of violence) of dialogue and reading
is much more intrinsic to things. It may be that such oridinary violence
of interpretation is so primordial an intentional violence that it is out
of the purview of any meaninful attribution of "violence" as such.
Primordial strife, perhaps. So, again, "violence" flutters in quotation
marks in and out of the discourse, like a moth toward a light it can not
reach.
Nonviolence maintains itself in the *gravity* of the possibility of
violence. In interpretation, I take the "ordinary violence of
interpretation" to be mere destructiveness. When this destructiveness
*falls*, it falls into violence (and "violence" falls from its quotation
marks). This is a kind of original space of nonviolence which the question
concerning violence and nonviolence opens up. By clarifying this space, it
is possible for nonviolence to wrest (or weave) itself *out of* the
Hericlitean sense, which I might call "biolence". I would refer here,
then, to something like "true" violence, where true acts as a kind of
existential intensifier which marks a certain *standing*, *standing up
in*, thinking, thinking again, all of the earmarks of the "true" as
opposed to what simply "is" without question. The same goes for "essential
violence". There is, somehow, a *first moment* which is questioned in a
certain way. Biolence is of the "first moment", violence is of the second
moment. (But this is nothing other than going beyond the "first cut" of
interpretation, rather than basing a fruition of Being on a series of
"first cuts"/shapshots, etc.)
Ok, so there is in a way a *gravity* and a *range*. In a "falling" into
violence, there can be passages through things in various ways: passing
>from nonviolence, relative nonviolence, to destruction, on the one hand,
or to *adjudicated violence* on the other. Or, simply falling into
violence, or into the *biolence* of sheer "brutality", which seems to me
to be something short of "violence" per se. (Unless you want to try 14
year olds as adults...) Nonviolence *makes this distinction*, or rather,
these distinctions are *made in the world* and nonviolence disalienates
>from them by taking them up in itself. (Without such a "taking up",
violence and destruction have various moments according to actors and
recipients, but these are diffuse and not recognized and integrated into a
coherent thinking). Range and gravity denote some fundamentals of
*posture*, and I'm reminded here in particular of a Jain text in which a
kind of "beautiful standing" is noted to be one of the attributes of the
Jain ethos.
So I guess this all means that I think we have to read Heidegger,
Heracltus and Gadamer equipped with a distinction between *biolence* (as
the naive perception of violence) and *violence*/essential violence, and
try and figure out which they're doing and thinking. Again, to be clear,
a Heideggerian thinking can not think *essential violence* properly
unless it *embarks on the question of violence* in certain ways.
Tom B.
On Wed, 24 Jul 1996, Iain Thomson wrote:
> To Chris and other others:
> On Kampf/strife: When, in the context of his explication of the
> Heraclitean polemos, Heidegger translates the latter an 'unsprungliche
> Kampf' (In 1935's IM)--a primordial struggle which first gives rise to the
> contenders as such (Heidegger is on the way to a-letheia)--he is in part
> obliquely critiquing the cult of personality then centered around Hitler's
> Mein Kampf! Of course, it is the most dangerous possible strategy of
> critique, for by attempting to appropriate the language of the Nazis in
> order to move 'the movement' in another direction, he risked simply
> allowing his own language to be coopted by that movement in turn.
> (Lacoue-Labarthe's betrayal thesis--which he borrows from Blanchot--is thus
> too simple.)
> On Violence: In addition to the sense of violence described in B&T
> (doing violence to our ordinary conceptons in order to break-through to the
> temporal structure ontologically conditioning those conceptions), there are
> at least two other senses intended by those who say that Heidegger's
> Auseinandersetzungen are 'violent.' These two sense correspond with the
> two main brances of contemporary hermeneutics (which go back to the early
> and the later Heidegger, respectively).
> 1. The early-Heidegger/Gadamerian sense: readings are violent
> insofar as they refuse (implicitly or explicitly) to respect the
> self-conception of the author. But, as Gadamer credits Heidegger with
> having taught him, every interpretation is violent in this sense, for if
> the interpretation did not suppose that it had discovered some meaning in
> the text which the author had missed, then it would not be an
> *interpretation,* but only (the acolyte's dream of) a pure exegesis (which,
> were it possible, would be superfluous!). Freud's conception of the
> analysand's motivated self-deception ('miscognition') and Marx's critiques
> of 'false-consciousness' (being mistaken about the real sources of one's
> ideology) would fit in this category.
> 2. The later Heidegger/ Derridean sense (which stems from
> Heidegger directly and by way of Levinas): Derrida accepts and
> hyperbolozes the assumptions implicit in the Gadamerian view that every
> interpretation is violent, such that A). the author has no privileged
> access to the meaning of her text and B). since 'no context can determine
> maning to the point of exhaustiveness,' meaning necessarily excapes the
> textual parameters set up by the author to contain it. If the author is
> thus only the first reader in the open-ended discursive community within
> which the text becomes meaningful, then 'violence' in the Gadamerian sense
> is not only unavoidable but actually beneficial; it helps resist
> hypostasizing the author's authority and thereby closing off the potential
> meaningfulness of a text. Does this mean that for Derrida 'hermeneutic
> violence' is a toothless charge? No, for JD hermeneutic violence is the
> reader's failure to respect the alterity of the text. (Hence an 'ethics of
> reading.') This means that an interpretation, while picking up on what the
> author has forgotten, overlooked, etc., must be careful not to claim the
> completeness of its own interpretation.
> Here--under the influence of the later Heidegger--Derrida's
> textualization of ontology is quite apparent; as Heidegger thinks Being
> cannot be completely understood (or conceptually circumscribed) by any
> number of metaphysical interpretations, so Derrida holds that the text
> cannot be exhausted by any number of readings. [If Being is the sole
> 'positivity' in the later Heidegger's thinking (but a curious positivity
> that lends itself to 'negative theology'), then perhaps Heidegger is the
> sole positivity of Derrida's].
>
> Iain
>
>
>
>
> --- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>
_____________________________________________________________________
"No civilized society can thrive upon victims whose humanity has been
permanently mutilated." -- Rabindranath Tagore
_____________________________________________________________________
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---