On Thu, 25 Jul 1996, Iain Thomson wrote:
> Tom,
> You are correct that my square quotes around 'violence' (in the early
> Heideggerian/Gadamerian sense and NOT the later Heideggerian/Derridean
> sense, a distinction about which you are strangely silent, given that you
> go to great lengths to say that the attempt to make such distinctions is
> important, necessary, etc.)
"Strangely silent"? Or perhaps you simply meant to say, "Tom, look at the
earlier/later distinction I'm making". I'm putting words in your mouth. To
which I can respond, well I didn't have time to look at everything
perfectly. It was one post, and only a post, not a dissertation.
I'll be very honest here: I need to look at it again. And my general
*summation* of the problematic and distinction in question was that *in
Heidegger*, while "strife" may be ontologically clarified, *the question
of violence* is not really opened. While I distinguished between mere
description and "asking the question of violence", I should have
indicated along the way that there might be such a thing as "mere
ontological clarification", again, as opposed to *asking the question*
and *thinking*. Again, I'll try to go back and see how this plays on what
you say about this "Later Heidegger-elision-Derrida". But it probably is
a good idea to break apart that elision and simply say "later Heidegger"
or "Derrida". There isn't a "Heidegger/Derrida". Derrida "stands next to
Heidegger" (in Benningtons words), but this does not make them identical
or even a happy hybrid.
I need to get as closely as possible into your developent of this stuff,
and I simply haven't had the time (which could have been your first
question).
indicate a certain skepticism. But you fail to
> note that I was clear about *why* I was skeptical. If you will forgive the
> self-reference, I wrote:
> > 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!).
> Do you object to this?
I only object to the problem presented by the "ubiquitous violence",
which I was referring to as *biolence*. This teaching of Heidegger is
what I would call "adjudicated violence". I feel that the problem of
ubiquity and, especially, intention was not yet addressed. I see this
"later Heidegger/Derridan 'position'" as still having not met the
criteria for having *asked the question of violence*. I note the
Derridean minimal schema: As little as possible.
I think the question of violence *is* asked in Derrida, but I think in
some ways or often it remains in utility only, even in Derrida. But has the
question of violence been asked in later Heidegger? I don't think so, but
that's also a function of my scholarship, which is poor.
Who among us doesn't accept some such
> 'violence--inextricable from the analyst's stance--as necessary?
I've fully allowed for such violence as *adjudicated violence*. But I did
so in passing, I should note, and not out of a free development of the
question of nonviolence. Interestingly, the totalization in which you form
your question (I guess it's an implicit totalization) is one that rises
often out of, especially, what I'm calling "naive nonviolence". It can be
found in the term "pacifism" in the most ubiquitous case. The question you
ask of "us" is: who doesn't accept some such violence? This asks of a
character who might in fact *totally* rid him or herself of all "analyst
style" violence. This remains "naive" (and the violence of the term
"naive" is beginning to bear on me) in that it does not stop to question
its own totalitarian schema; the *biolence* of this general condition
would lie, then, in the dreary process of smashing against the rocks of
the ideal. But this is *precisely* the current status of nonviolence.
The
> scare-quotes thus mark this kind of violence off from what I take to be
> violence proper, which I presume would always be objectionable. For me all
> violence is not equally objectionable--and to act as if it is only weakens
> the critique against it by overly diluting the term. Even the Buddhists
> recognize that life lives on life, and that while we should try not to step
> on the bugs, we can't help killing the microbes...
Right. I haven't suggested that we could help killing microbes. But I
feel like you're suggesting that that is part of my point. On the
contrary. (I am sensitive to being take in this way due to numerous
interactions concerning the question of nonviolence in a more political
context, so I should apologize if I'm misinterpreting you here.
> Someone--it may have been JD--once relayed an anecdote to me that
> had something to do Gadamer as a student smashing a bug that was crawling
> on S&Z, and it leaving a bloody splotch right on a (to me fairly
> objectionable) passage about the 'perishing' of animals (or something like
> that--anyone remember the details?)
Indeed, and, as is often the case, the bug of a question, the question of
violence/nonviolence, may well have been squashed at the same time. To
spell this out clearly: the smashing of the bug is offered as a
refutation of the "position of nonviolence", according to its own
totalitarian ideal through which, violence begetting violence, it
miscasts the question from the start.
> I also don't think Heidegger's thinking of Heraclitean polemos as
> the Urspruenglicher Kampf necessarily begets or reproduces further
> violence, as you put it, since I don't think Heidegger's assertion of a
> kind of 'ontological agonistic' *is* inherently violent in the
> objectionable sense.
Yes, that first comment was in fact meant to be hyperbole. But (sorry if
I'm being too obscure here), it was really a hyperbole of *thought* (if
you can believe it): the thought that I had was that for some reason
there is a kind of definite *reflection* of the political in the
philosophical. But short of even proposing some mechanism, specular or
other, my "hyperbole of thought" gives me to a *deep suspicion* about
this. For some reason, and it really is hard for me to find the reason, I
doo have this feeling. Let me look at "ontological agonistic" conception
again. It was associated with "democracy", too. Strife, opponentiality,
etc. I guess we could call this "good will strife". Unexamined, I think
this, failing to ask the question of violence, lets the movement between
"biolence" and violence go undistinguished. But still, why should there
necessarily be a political-actual (??) correlate of violence? I guess
because the text, no matter how it tries, remains in some way an index of
the general milieu of the time. No, that's not really it. No, the *real*
reason for my making this statement is: well, Heidegger is *talking about
the world*, including the world of politics. And I can't see in
Heidegger, or *from where Heidegger is* any possible vision of a politics
that is genuinelyu nonvioelnce. In other words, I can't take away from
the notion of "good will strife", or rather "ontological violence", a
tacit affirmation of war in the straight-forward sense of countries
attacking other countries, etc.
We would have to look at the details of his account
> [see IM 61-63/EM 47-49], but I'd argue that the opposite conclusion would
> be closer to the truth, since, though the particular ontopolitical
> intervention I discussed last time apparently failed to effect any real
> change, it was intended in part *as a critique of* a very violent (in the
> most objectionable sense) hegemony consolidating their power within the
> Nazi movement, to barely mention the fact that Heidegger does
> 'violence'--in the non-objectionable sense--to the ordinary understandoing
> of _polemos_ (i.e., Streit not Krieg) as he attempts to recover its
> ontological meaning.
Yeah. Well to me Heidegger is very "borderline". I would need to see the
details, and I do have IM, so if I find the time, I'll look for it. I
dont' know what the other is (EM).
And then we have the "ontological intervention" thing. I simply can't
accept "war" or "polemos" as a signifier which can be so easily and
freely ripped from its geopoligical origins (not that those are the
*only* origins). My general impression remains that he "uses" the
question of violence in order to get adjudicated violence (the violence
to metaphysics of Destruktion), but this remains parasitic on the
question "proper", a question which remains unasked. For I think that to
truly ask this question would require a kind of thread (and no doubt, a
rather transformative one) which would have to traverse Heidegger's
writing in a *thematic-substantive* way. Nor can we allow any simple and
easy distinction "early/later Heidegger", I suspect.
Tom B.
> Iain
>
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> "Und wer gut verfolgt, lernt leicht f o l g e n: --ist er doch
> einmal--hinterher!"
> "And whoever persecutes well, learns readily how _to follow_: for he is
> used to going after somebody else!"
> --Nietzsche, "The Ugliest [haesslichste] Man" [i.e., the
> Socrates-in-Nietzsche], _Zarathustra_ IV.7.
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