Michael Eldred writes: "And to animals. . .For Heidegger the openness to
Being is pretty much equivalent to the openness to language."
I don't have the text in front of me, but I recall a line which struck me
>from Bataille's introduction to de Sade's __120 Days of Sodom__ that
"violence does not speak" That violence is deprived of language and
deprives others of language may be interesting to grapple with in terms
of Heidegger's understanding of oppenness to Being through poetic
language as making a way.
(In this regard, I think Derrida's __Of Spirit__ (perhaps) doesn't go far
enough in its anthropocentric critique of the animal (weltarm).)
Of course, going even further off the map, I am reminded as well of
Benjamin's distinction between predatory violence, messianic violence and
the violence of the state. Although in widely divergent ways the question of
violence in Heidegger, Bataille and Benjamin does seem to relate
crucially to the question of language, although I am suspicious of any
attempt to "enable" language against violence. For Bataille in
particular, the violence in question excludes the possibility of mediation.
Douglas Scott Berman
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