_____________________________________________________________________
"I'll take my coffee without sugar produced in slave labor camps, third
world plantations or by prison chain gangs, thank you."
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My apologies for the length. Michael's comments, aside from the first,
are preceded by "Michael:". My comments are preceded by a triple dash
(---).
On Sun, 28 Jul 1996, M.Eldred_artefact wrote:
Cologne, 28 July 1996
Dear Tom,
Thank you for your extended elucidations on the 'question of violence'.
They are highly persuasive and allay some of my qualms concerning this
morally loaded area. Yes, I do tend to shy away from this question of
violence, partly because of an abhorrence of moralism, but also because of
a felt impotence in the face of the phenomenon of human violence.
--- Perhaps (and I suspect this word is happening a frequently in my
comments for specific reasons) it is integral to the question of violence
that a freedom to the question of impotence, potency and power be
broached. This must mean a disruption of the ethos in which all action
must proceed and all "philosophizing" must come to an end. And this brings
us in the proximity of the question of "virility" again. For if we can not
sustain inaction in a responsibile questioning, then all inaction will be
taken as impotence. We may, of course, show our papers of our *courage of
inaction*, and probably must also do this at times, though there is an
independent moment in which, with or without our courage, thinking must be
able to truly *think* the question of violence.
Michael: I was always impressed by Hegel's admonishments against the mere
Sollen, pointing out its impotence, even though he juxtaposes it to the
necessity of reason. But Heidegger's shying away from ethics has to do
with his focus on possibility, which he regards (in SZ, for example) as a
modality of being higher than necessity (or ought-to- be).
--- No doubt. But what is "higher" here? I don't know what Sollen is, and
don't have a German-English dictionary. Is it "action"? But "shying away"
>from ethics having to do with *possibility*, can we elucidate this? First
of all, as a comportment, we have "shying away". For an ostensible
reason: that possibility is "higher" than obligation. I think the fact --
and here I consign the *Existential Analytic* to a certain *facticity* --
is that "possibility" is simply *more structural* than "ought". Is (at
least early) Heidegger (though this must also imply at least some of later
Heidegger) basically "structuralist"? Yet, if the "underlying"
(substantial?) or *abstracted* structures of existence are of a piece with
the phenomenological *priorities* Heidegger himself routinely establishes,
this means that the *first instances* are never *existential* or
*existentiel* in this structural or skeletal sense at all.
--- And it is a *sense*, I suspect that the structural itself, the
enframing, is itself simply another variety of poetic dwelling or another
mask. (My general tack here is that the dominance of enframing is *made
possible* by the forgetting of (non)violence, and in that forgetting,
Heidegger remains unhappily mesmerized by technology.) Indeed, this means
that the "ought", "will be" and necessity, from which we may *induce*
futurity and possibility, are rather what is primary or at least have
*ontological priority* over possibility. There is no "pure structure of
existence"; in the first instance, one is not in the futurity of
"possibility", but the promise of dinner this evening, the need to pay
one's bills, the demand for our intervention in the case of, for example,
Iraq, a TV show that will be on tonight, etc.
--- But this take I've taken here must be considered carefully. The
general tack is that of *reversing the reduction*, and a movement from
eksistence to insistence. "Insistence" denotes ekstatic Dasein's "being
substantive" as essential-existent and poetically dwelling. I will
tentatively suggest that nonviolence is more "insistent" than eksistent
and constitutes a vastly different kind of thinking than is to be found in
_Being and Time_. But it also *depends* on the *freedom to reduction and
essential clarification*, too. Thus, it is more irreducibly *hybrid*, and
attempts to be faithful to the hybridity of Being in special ways. I'll
just have to leave this, as with many other thoughts in this post,
trailing off like so many threads for the time being.
Michael: For me (being of sorts a disciple of Heidegger) thinking has to
do largely with opening up historical possibilities. Since violence is
such an horrendous and ubiquitous phenomenon, it seems to me that it
cannot be addressed directly without quickly taking on moral hue.
--- Perhaps the condition of discipleship can be called into question.
I'll only mention Nietzsche's well known remark that one "follows him by
following oneself." Heidegger is in this "spirit", I think. To be a
disciple of Heidegger means, in the first instance, to be a disciple of
the question of Being, of thinking, etc. We have this difference to reckon
with whether or not we are questioning concerning violence.
--- I don't understand: "opening up historical possibilities". What does
this mean?
--- The "hue" (again, could be a "hotness"): Heidegger wishes for real
opponents in thinking, and not simply dialogists. In Heidegger, there is a
latent sense of nonviolence in "opponentiality", standing opposed to one
another, etc. (I forget where this occurs; perhaps _Thinker as Poet_.) Of
course, Nietzsche calls for something *like* "strife", too, unabashedly,
but never the less with style. Heidegger, thus, is calling for the hue of
the moral in thinking to *authenticate* itself, to vitalize thought.
Recalling the heat.
--- Is this a second, latent "revitalization" of phenomenology? Is it a
mere wish? Is it at the nether reaches of Heidegger's thinking? Or is it,
possibly, that which is so close to Heidegger that he, and often we, can't
see it? Again and again, we will find any number of "rallying cries",
openings of historic possibilities, destinal and fateful advents in
Heidegger, as in Husserl. The existential moment of the "rallying cry" may
in fact be crudely and structurally summed up as "resoluteness". We might
say, with regards to this sense of the primacy of the lived world, as
opposed to the "pure structure", that Heidegger's introduction of
"resoluteness" reads like a bad novel. "It was a dark and stormy night. I
was feeling resolute..."
--- Grasping this "moral moment" may be something that must become what it
(already) is. But this thinking must necessarily remain alienated so long
as it can not authenticate itself as nonviolence. Why? There may be no
one, elegant reason. There may be many reasons, and it may in fact be
utterly practical as well: a Heideggerian neutrality concerning violence,
issued in language which speaks the name "violence", may be too dangerous,
or too close to home. It may be at the limit of objectivity beyond which a
certain mode of "thinking" can't or doesn't want to go. This limit would
also, presumably, set the limit you are generally indicating concerning
"thought". Thus, "violence" could never be thought's theme. Unless the
destiny of the structuralism of _Being and Time_ was the resurgence and
reaffirmation of *poesis*. Perhaps, then, the return to *dwelling
poetically* has as one of its primary requirements a *standing in
nonvioelnce*, or taking up nonviolence as an independent
thematic-substantive, ethical comportment and concern. This relates to a
recent comment to the list suggesting that technology constitutes a kind
of flight from life in its violence. The "practical necessity", which I'm
not putting well, of structuralism (I realise it's strange to call
Heidegger structuralist) obtains when the *nonviolence* as such is hidden.
For, historically, nonviolence, in a robust fruition such as that of
Gandhi, has been precisely that which has been able to stare violence in
the face most directly, while war has in certain ways historically
constituted a *hiding from violence*, the price of which has been much
greater violence.
--- But doesn't "nonviolence" as such also embody an unacceptable
structural moment? I will hold that "violence" is more "substantive" and
even "poetic" than "structure" and "existence". But even so, is the
structural moment really unacceptable? It is acceptable according to the
same logics, perhaps, as those involved in tracing the physiology of the
human or other skeleton. In this regard, the practitioner of the
Existential Analytic must, like the craftsman Heidegger employs for his
discussions of causality, take his or her lead from the occasional cause,
just as the skeleton specialist and physical therapist, as shepherds of
Being like the rest of us, must take their leads from the occasions of the
lived body, the needs of an elderly person, a ballet dancer with a sprain,
etc. Acceptable in its limits as a moment, for its time. A finitized
structuralism within a general economy, so to speak.
--- What does this shift mean with regards to the Existential Analytic?
And is Heidegger's movement into *poetic thinking* a reinstantiation of
that space within which, with a constant charge of some kind or other
which might mark the poetic, as opposed to the cool bones of the
Existential Analytic, the moral conditions are themselves reinstantiated,
the very moral conditions which Heidegger shyed away from, put in
suspension, etc.? Was the move to the Existential Analytic historically
founded in part by the violence of the moral, as addressed by Nietzsche,
for example? This historical originality is also of a piece with
Heideggerian priorities in phenomenological and geneaological/etymological
faithfulness. For Heidegger is not so much wedded to the Analytic, or
perhaps even to the thought of Being, as he is wedded to Truth and the
Question.
--- So, if history speaks, then after Auschwitz, which was also a certain
destruction of history, what kind of *poetry*, if any, is possible? I'm
leaping a bit too much here. But to continue in this vein for a moment, or
to take a departure from this woodpath, was the Analytic itself a
technological invention in service of the manufacture of corpses, or, to
think in the language of Bergson in his writing on morality and religion,
a machine for the creation of gods? For the realization of the movements
of the Analytic do not give one to imagine a corpse, but rather a Being
elivened, we will be given to think, by the clarification of its own
(resolute) understanding of its own Being. A bad novel, maybe, but hardly
a corpse. But perhaps the existentially clarified Being in fact remains
"dead", or at least deaf, to the calls of our times.
--- This seemingly extreme thought is maybe more tolerable when we bear in
mind that Dasein is always dying. In my own violence, my own
being-violent, another range or Being does not exist: my own existence *as
nonviolence*. Or Heidegger's. Or my *authentic, disalienated* existence as
nonviolence. The living of a Camp guard is the dying of a Jew/homosexual,
etc. But it is also the continual dying of the one who refuses the
fascist regime, as a potentiality for Being for the guard. Therefore, the
fateful self-grasping of Being (as such) is itself, as fateful, a matter
of existence. A certain struggle obtains between nonviolence and the
Analytic, but it is the structural of the Analytic which constitutes the
struggle as such, and it is the standing of nonviolence which can *keep*
the structuralism of the Analytic without casting it in terms of absolute
existence, or perhaps absolute knowledge. It is precisely nonviolence
which can open the multiplicity in which the Analytic can exist, or
eksist. Nonviolence insists on it. We may even go so far as to say that
the Analytic *cannot think*. "What is called thinking?"
--- But the Being of the Analytic is never simply a theme, it is always a
thrown-projectional-resolute being-towards-death-in-the-world-with- others
which is in each case "mine", someone's "mine". Though,
phenomenologically, we know that this, too, is not the case: it is,
rather, a child facing a saturday with no school, two people chatting in a
cafe, someone making a carreer decision, a fireman on the roof of a
burning building, someone languishing in an insitution for the elderly, a
man being raped 65 times in two days in a prison, the reflection of an
elderly man as portrayed in a Bergman film. Given something like the flesh
it originally had, the Analytic (and it is, indeed, an analytic) is not
lost, but it remains in a mode of *service* to primordial and occasional
conditions. And this is where Heidegger went, or tried to go, in the
emphasis on poetic dwelling.
--- What business have I, we, whomever, to say that the thinking of
nonviolence in any way *belongs* *in* the midst of such a project? The
answer to this question lies in what is read into Heidegger, what happens
in reading and thinking Heidegger, but perhaps most of all, with what
spirit of original intention are the Heideggerian questions asked, treks
undertaken, the mood and "spirit" of the structural moment, the
"historical advent" of phenomenology, etc. Heidegger, of course, like
Husserl, again, and Descartes, etc., had first to get in contact with this
"great spirit", so to speak, and this is not supplemental to their
projects.
--- If this originary impetus/opening (I'll avoid "spirit") *is already
predominantly* or *significantly* a matter of nonviolence, then the
Analytic and Heidegger's paths remain valid in certain ways. But can we
traverse it in the same way? In Heideggerian language, *nonviolence has to
wrest itself, nonviolently*. And its wresting may well constitute a series
of *refusals*, "nonactions", moments of "passive resistance", rather than
a series of "positive and dramatic acts", especially if the poetry of the
world is blatently false, brutally installed and intolerably linked to
violence, a violence which would exceed the *very vision* of that world.
Indeed: the self-wresting refusal of nonviolence by which, in
contestation, it "call itself into being", may most often be the *very
refusal of the demanded positive act*, and this is not without risk and
may require considerable courage. (Such a courage was probably manifested
in part, and probably in a weak form, in Heidegger's reticence after the
war. This has always been my impression.) But this is *precisely* what
nonviolence is and does when practiced in the positive sense. Without
hiding its strategy (rather, it announces it in advance), it disrupts the
codes and *arena* of violence, the conditions of the *frame*, by
addressing, in the world and through specific actions, the very blindess
to *arena*, *opening* and *setting* which constitutes violence. In doing
so, it forgivingly seeks to *persuade* and to *teach* the violent to
*transcend* the arena of polemos and view it as not only just one figure
in a multiplicity of arenas, but precisely that figure which constitutes
itself by the foreclosure of the multiciplity. Is nonviolence therefore
multicplicity? No. Being is multicity. *Nonviolence* is the negation of
*violence* as the foreclosure of multiplicity, alternativity, the Other.
Nonviolence, when not errant, as "a saving power" grows *where danger
grows*, and recedes in due measure.
--- So, returning to the founding impetus or conditions of the Analytic
adventure, are we not often trying to get more out of it than it can give,
or even forcing it on conditions for which it is not suited, rather like
trying to choreograph a ballet using a skeletal chart of a ballet dancer?
And, likewise, is the Death of _Being and Time_, which "simplifies"
Dasein, as Heidegger says, not itself a rather grossly overextended
organizing principle? (We would need, then, to look closely at the death
of nonviolence.) Taking a lead, but not *the* lead, from Heidegger, this
is why we must say "the *question* of (non)violence" or "the question
concerning (non)violence". We need to stop short of formulating such a
question definitively. The question is being asked, for example, in this
discussion. And, by the thinking I'm pursuing here, it may be that
nonviolence is *precisely* the very preservation of the free opening of
the question *as such*. It might be deemed *rude* to ask it in the *midst*
of a discussion on "standing presence". The question of that possibility
of rudeness and attention- getting has come up already. Must not the
question of violence, if it really isn't asked in Heidegger, always mean a
*perversion* of "proper" "Heideggerian" discourse and discipleship? And
why not *take it elsewhere*? But is the constitution of a "place" "in the
name of Heidegger" itself not a problem antithetical to the thinking
pursued by Heidegger?
--- This means that if one understands Heidegger to a reasonable extent,
there can never really be a "Heidegger List", except in certain
pedagogical/scholarly senses. But Heidegger is bigger, and "smaller", than
that. Already in discussions on *art*, the roles of educators, students,
aestheticians, etc., are called into question. And seriously. So it is no
simple "trick" to turn Heidegger's own endorsement of *thinking* against
his authorial weight; it is perhaps the one of the best expressions of
discipleship, a discipleship which stands *alongside* Heidegger in service
to the *sache* of thinking. We leave a more "moderate Heideggerian
project" a space to remain untouched, but not unthematized. Practically
speaking, this means that the question of nonviolence does not draw
conclusions which would in turn change the structure of this list, what
posts are permissable, etc. Indeed, the very business of *calling into
question* the admissability of posts, which I attempted to "aggravate"
momentarily with my repost reporting on the Iraq embargo, is grist for the
mill for nonviolence. Such an accordance of space, raising the question,
within an *actional* framework, is a typically "revolutionary" gesture. We
can know, at this phase of the question, only that we are given to think
the question of nonviolence, in a somewhat "revolutionary" way, in the
vicinity of Heidegger, in part owing to the bequeathed knowledge of *the
violence of revolutionism*. For that is a considerable part of what calls
for thinking. The violence of revolutionism is one of the things Arendt
cites when she pursues the question of violence in _On Violence_, where
she notes that most revolutions have tended to instantiate regimes which
were just as or more violent than the regimes they overturned.
--- This turn takes us into the vicinity of a fundamental distinction
between totalistic, totalitarian or absolute nonviolence and "nonnaive
nonviolence", as I'm provisionally calling it. Nonviolence does not,
unlike prevailing Dasein, hesitate to call itself into question. A "more
mature nonviolence", "courageous nonviolence", nonviolent nonviolence,
reflective or thoughtful nonviolence, or nonviolence which has submitted
*itself* to nonviolence; nonviolence with a conscience (albeit undoubtedly
a different form of "conscience" than that clarified in _Being and Time_).
People who point out that I may be rude or even violent with my postings
in this thread, or my posting of news concerning the Iraq embargo, as
someone pointed out to me in a private post recently, are right to do so,
in my opinion. And they, too, may be rude or even violent. But since the
*matter* for nonviolence is the *setting of the arena*, the raising of the
question of *propriety*, fit and limit takes on a special flavor in the
course of this questioning. The criticism that it is striking that the
discourse on nonviolence can assert itself violently is *just one* of the
special conditions obtaining in the path of nonviolence.
--- It could be pointed out here that the discourse on nonviolence can
never itself in any *immediate* sense *intervene in action*. This is a
crude formulation which seeks to confront the tryant of the "direct order
in speech". And it is a point taken (at least by me), provided only that
its revolutionary overturning of the tyrant of speech (of there ever
reallky is one as such) is not itself just as violent.
--- The "discourse" on nonviolence, thus deprived of a certain power I'll
leave unspecified for want of space, is not without effects. Whether there
is ever any pure "thought" or "action", when seen in light of the question
of (non)violence, seems an open question to me. And whether there is any
discourse which does not itself remain bound to Being, is not in the
vicinity *precisely* of the danger of *alienation* of which Heidegger
teachs and which is so specifically pertinent in this century is an open
question. When Nietzsche responds to his "straw man" or posed interlocutur
of the British moralist in the question of "judging the moral action" by
saying that this moralist has in fact performed three actions, not one,
some of which are actions *of thought*, he is saying that the scene and
conditions of action obtain in thought. Nietzsche *does this for a
reason*. This reason *is not truth alone* ("truth at any price"). It is
nonviolence as the concern about the violence accomplished by thoughtless,
conscienceless and psychologically inept moralizing. The *space and
founding moment of the transvaluation of "all values" is the space of
nonviolence and desire*. (This elision of nonviolence and desire will
require considerable thought.) Thus, the "impotence" of nonviolence is
such only in a cruder conception of action and power. But, again, we
mistake the constitution of nonviolence when we fail to recognize that
nonviolence is not just another power, but is *precisely* at issue with
what constitutes power and action as such. Again, Arendt comes to mind for
me here: in _On Violence_, the question of power is one which must be
freed from dominion in order to let the phenomenon of power show itself in
its authentic diversity. Nonviolence, like Socratic justice, continually
evades being a "being" in the world and is rather, like space and time, a
condition of possibility and manner in which beings are.
--- Let me note that Gandhi did at times endorse violent action. He twice
recommended Indian participation in British war efforts, handled specific
questions about the physical attack of people both within and outside of
consciously chosen acts of civil disobedience, judging in favor of
violence if necessary in certain ways outside of specific nonviolent
contestation, and recommending at one point that Indians learn weaponry so
as to be on appropriate par with the British they could have been called
to defend. Only a nonviolence that is founded on this possibility, which
is in fact also a nonviolence awakened to itself as *founded on the
possibility of violence* can really maintain itself. In this regard, the
*existence* of nonviolence is also in question. (Likewise, the mere
presence of violence, even if violence or its possibility is a necessary
but insufficient condition for nonviolence, does not therefore constitute
the presence of nonviolence. And the invocation of this "rule of the
exception" in/of nonviolence is one of the cheif corruptions of
nonviolence, or else it is an outright lie.) The conditions of possibility
of existence are not foreign to the question of nonviolence, nor that
question as asked in this Heideggerian setting. And it is here, indeed,
that the question brings to bear a particiular weight: since in a certain
way, the "existentialism" *of Heidegger*, and all that that can serve as a
metanym for, has a peculiar *occluding* function vis a vis nonviolence.
That is to say, the exposed bone, explosed through the cutting of flesh in
an operation, *occludes* (nonviolently or in adjudicated violence, in
biolence, adjudicated violence, mere suspension or violence) the flesh of
the moral which is cut in order to explose the bone. Or, the *operation,
as an occasion* does so. Perhaps this take on the *surgical theater*, like
the theater of war to which Nietzsche and Heidegger both wanted and did
not want to return, is what lies closest to Heidegger. Again, the dispute
with Heidegger takes place *properly* in so far as his thinking attains
not simply to a thinking of existence, but seeks to constitute a more
encompassing initiative. It does, and that is why it is so attractive, in
part.
Michael: Much of what you say I can subscribe to. Heidegger's inability to
say any thing about the Holocaust (apart from the notorious lines in his
Bremen lecture ) has worried me for some time, also his inability to come
clean in a political context about his brief commitment to National
Socialism.
Michael: Here some further random remarks: Your reference to a question of
nonviolence causes me to ask: Is this an originary phenomenon? The
negation in nonvio lence seems to indicate this. By nonviolence you
probably do not mean the 'merely' absence of violence, but a positive
phenomenon. How is this to be named?
--- For Gandhi, this negational structure (a-himsa) was grounds for the
search --- and this element of search, chance, creativity and
experimentalism is very important --- for a new word to describe what they
were doing in the first campaign for the rights of Indians, in response to
draconian laws enacted in South Africa. In a gesture which, to my mind,
itself ties to nonviolence in some crucial ways, Gandhi had a contest to
find a new name. A positive name was suggested, which Gandhi then reworked
into the formulation: "satyagraha", or truth-force, soul-force, or
truth-persuation. I have always found this positivite formulation (which
for me echos Foucauldian power/knowledge) inadequate. My "solution" is the
mere addition: nonviolence, as this was suggested to me in the formulation
"ahimsa satyagraha" in article relaying the story of a specific satyagraha
undertaken in recent years. So I am given to say, "nonviolent
thoughtaction". To me, this *is* a positive formulation, I guess. Some
have suggested "shalom/salem" as a positive formulation.
--- But what of this negational structure: non-violence? The problem of
the positive formulation is that if overburdened by metaphysics as
*meta-physics*, it will be taken as a *being*, I suspect. In a Sartrean
framework, consiousness as negativity and freedom (and thus demoralized)
is, when "remoralized", nonviolence as well. Its positivity may be its
negational structure. I tend to view this negation of violence as a
*standing in the gravity of the possibility of violence*, where *standing*
constitutes a positive negation of the force of gravity. (Being
"nonserious" is only one way to accomplish this...)
--- It should be noted that the Gandhian term was developed for practical
reasons, and his preferred positive term still included ahimsa, but also,
in truth: love. *Ah, but that's "hot", too, isn't it?*
--- So: non-violence. Not violence. Not violent. Violent? NOT! But the
negation of violence presumes that violence has, in the first instance,
been given to thought. Therefore, nonviolence is a taking up the question
of violence into thought. We will recall that for Heidegger every negation
is an affirmation of the not. Nonviolence is essentially affirmative. But
its affirmation is an affirmation of the negation of violence. But
violence itself is already participatory in negation. In what way?
Violence is never simply negation as an operation of thought, but in what
is violent, something is taken away, ruptured, torn or even brought to
death. We could, of course, take violence through the phenomenological
paces. Or can we? In fearing, we have that which is feared, fearing, and
what is feared for. But *violence* is not a "feeling", world-constitutive
state of mind, etc. No, violence is *of Being* as the rupture of Being.
More on that later. But, we can guess that what is feared about is, in
some sense, violence. A violence to another, a violence to oneself. This
is an unclarified sense of violence. I thing that would would do well to
read Arendt closely for clues on how to address the "world", what is "in
the world", politics and power, to see how a movement from a Heideggerian
thinking to one which can ask about the role of violence is possible. My
general view here is that violence "worlds" in certain way, which I'll
indicate obliquely below.
--- I noted that Arendt does discuss the phenomena of violence and power.
To do this, we take violence *as a phenomenon*. But the phenomenon is a
*showing*, perhaps a *self-showing*, even a shining forth, a radiance,
etc. Any such showing is a showing *of* violence. To be sure, showing
itself, or disappearing (for example, political disappearances) can itself
be violent. In this case, only a phenomenology, or a *thinking* of
phenomenology, could give us access to the violence of phenomenology
(which may, in fact, be the disappearance of the violence of
phenomenology). Showing has two elements, at least: the showing, and that
which is shown. This is true not only for violence. But violence, as I
think someone suggested, is at the same time *involved* in the conditions
of perception, the constitution of otherness, etc., in special ways.
--- Is violence, then, simply one kind of Being? A species (though not an
animal or "evil spirit") within a more encompassing general
thematic-condition (or thematic-substantivity)? The *question of
violence* is, thus, *just another question*. (That is what makes its being
grasped, asked or undertaken "fateful" or "destinal".) We have, doing
justice to Heidegger, proceeded in substituting "thought" for
"phenomenology", "question" for "epoche". But the condition still, at
least in Heidegger, obtains: that only a thinking of thinking can enable a
thinking of the violence of thinking, which may in fact be precisely the
failure to give thought to violence. And, to get to the point, I am
inclined to suggest here that only a thinking of thinking (which of course
is everywhere already in Heidegger) can enable an addressing of the
question of violence. The advental structure of the question of
nonviolence, like any hermeneutic advent, has the double, genetic
structure of foreknowledge, forehaving, foresight. The emergent question
of violence in thought *worlds*, as violence worlds, though not in exactly
the same way.
--- But why is this reflectivity necessary for the question of violence to
be addressed? And is the violence of the supression of that reflectivity,
in so far as it obtains, really of a special kind intrinsic to the matter
of violence? This question of thought in the horizon of the question of
violence has taken us far from the *negativities* of violence and of
non-violence. In addressing the question of the "positive formulation of
nonviolence", we might do well to recall Merleau-Ponty: "We need a
negation of a negation that does not yeild a positive." This entails the
problem, if it is a problem, of a "return to the positive", positivity,
which I've pointed to above.
--- Here a multi-hued, multi-layered world of positivities and negativies
emerges. But violence is never merely a *negative*. The *negativity* of
the negative is a structural clarification, casting, enframing. In the
"first instance", there *is no pure negation*, but rather: the loss of a
friend, the shift of a position on a housing issue, a refusal to cooperate
by a lover in an argument with a lover, etc. The structuralism of _Being
and Time_, like that of the "Neant" for Sartre, is perhaps a world, or a
dream, in which violence is not possible. And it is perhaps a flight from
the violence of the world, an understandable flight, that founds the dream
of structure, or even at times a "revolution" in which "the human", the
*humanitas*, *poesy*, *dwelling poetically*, even "truth" may not be
possible, either. In which Being is not possible. Yet, we know Heidegger
suggests early on, in _Being and Time_, albeit en route to saying
something else, that there is such a thing as a "violent interpretation".
Even there, the phenomenological objectivity reigns in the sense that a
*projected range of possibilities inclusive of the violent interpretation*
is displayed/employed.
--- "Even in the most violent of interpretations..." The violent
interpretation is projected as possible but is not pursued, and the
violence of Destruktion is self-admitted, cautious, and in a sense,
nonviolent. It *announces itself*. "We will have to be violent right
about here. There's no avoiding it. Violence is to be avoided, but we will
have to proceed, bearing that in mind. We must make mention of it. We
can't just go on and enact this violence, we have to mention it and be
aware of what we are doing." The violence is structuralized (taken into
the dream of structure) as: destrucktion or deconstruction (perhaps
following Nietzsche's "rules of war").
--- But perhaps this is because the Analytic can not proceed in any way
other than in the mode of the "structural". This becoming-structural of
the skeletal movement of the Analytic is paid for by a violence: not by
the violence to Western metaphysics, but by the violence to violence
itself as becoming-structural, by turning violence into deconstruction.
This would be a *violence beyond violence*, a radical disappearance of
violence. But such violence beyond violence marks some of the *most
uniquely violent advents* of our time. And that calls for thiking.
--- And is a violence to violence not to be desired? But what would a
violence, as such, to violence itself *be*? A violence to violence would
be a *disappearance of violence*, and, as violence, its immediate
reinstantiation at another "level" or in another way, not the amelioration
of violence. When someone attacks another violently, to ameliorate, to
reconcile those involved, or simply to protect the one attacked does not
seem to me to be a violence to violence. It would only be appropriate to
see it this way in an *alienation from Dasein as a foundational
entity/condition*, taking *violence* as a Dasein. Violence is not a
Dasein, it is *one of the possibilities for Dasein*. The violence to
violence is the violence to the violence of Dasein, in a positive and
difficult sense, when a given therefore allowed to continue or even
exponentially develop. The victim of a rape *has a positive violence* and
hopes for amelioration only if the rape is able to presence to others *as
violence*. The silencing of such a victim affirms not only the rape, but
instantiates a new, and potentially much greater, violence. To be sure,
according to Heidegger, the rapist is either "Guilty!" or else "a sinner",
but somehow I personally don't find this very reassuring or even
insightful. But, then, perhaps "thinking" is not a matter of reassurance
and not for those seeking it.
--- But thinking has misunderstood itself completely if it thinks that it
is doing without assurances, is outside of conditions of urgency, is
without its charge, as I've pointed out already. The movements of the
Analytic are not founded on the suspension of one's own concerns, but
rather on their clarification and integration. Although ekstatic, the
movements of _Being and Time_ are in fact an alienated attempt at
*insistence*, perhaps even *insistent nonviolent*.
--- Is not only phenomenology, but even "thinking", then, a flight from
violence, a "flight from life" in the Nietzschean sense? I hold that it
is, and that that which stands in the condition of nonviolence is neither
simply thought nor action, but thoughtaction or *satyagraha*. But to
continue with the question: is the becoming-structural of the Analytic a
*suspension of life* that finds itself as such only when it is turned
upon? And is the turning to "thinking", or "the other thinking" still
perhaps bound in this alienation from the morality of nonviolence? Is the
in-sistence of non-violence the affirmation of life? And *why not simply
affirm violence*, in its raw truth? That is the Nietzschean wish, it seems
to me. Violence has taught us its lesson all too well. Nietzsche's, and
perhaps Heidegger's true modi operandi are not Being or "Life", but
nonviolence. Only they don't know it. (I'm repeating myself a little.)
--- But the affirmation of Being through nonviolence would only be
possible if, in the first instance, Being was *given*, and not *created or
conjured* by some analytic or path in questioning. And if the affirmation
of Being is possibile in nonviolence, it is also possible in violence. And
*non-naive or thoughtful nonviolence knows and is founded on this
fundamental possibility*.
--- But isn't the first affirmation of being "will"? Or "desire"? I don't
know enough about the theme of will in Heidegger here, and must deal with
the restrictions, for the time being, of my scholarship. But it seems to
me that *there is will* and *there is desire*. And other things as well,
all of which have a certain affirming character. If we are to think
nonviolently, we will do our utmost (and the "utmost" and the "even" of
"even the most violent of interpretations" itself will deserve
considerable treatment) to recognize and affirm this plurality of
affirmations "in their authentic diversity". Thus, the negation taking
place in non-viololence is at the same time the precondition for the
nonviolent affirmation of affirmation in its plurality. Whereas, as
National Socialism has "taught" us, as violence teaches us everwhere, the
reckless affirmation of "will" alone is a rupture of catastrophic
proportions.
--- Nonviolence therefore presents itself to is as a *choice*, perhaps a
choice that one chooses to keep on making. But it accomplishes itself *as
a choice* when the *very conditions of choice* are given to thought.
Michael: To ask about violence in the context of Heidegger, there is
probably no better place to start than with *polemos*.
--- I guess I'm saying that to ask about violence in the context of
Heidegger, there is no better place to start than with Dasein, Being and
the thing itself: violence..
Michael: The phenomenon of violence: Can we ask: What is violence? (ti
estin...;)
Michael: Violence is an aspect of being-together (Mitsein). As very many
have poin ted out since SZ, Mitsein remains relatively undeveloped in
Heidegger. (The entire dimension of the political has to be thought from
being-together. The polis is the clearing for being-together.)
--- I think these are good directions.
Michael: Levinas is one thinker who has concentrated on Mitsein, focussing
on a 'primordial scene' and pushing the claim of ethic s to the fore,
before any claim of being. This, I think, has considerably impa ired the
value of Levinas' insights, because in order to insist on ethics so
obsessively he is forced to interpret being as some sort of disgusting
dimension involved with egocentricity.
--- But one might say the opposite: that this has in fact preserved and
heightened the value of his insights.
Michael: Therefore, he never comes to elucidating being-together in its
own right as a dimension of being. It is not at all clear to me in which
dimension at all that the other is encountered in Levinas.
Michael: The capitalization of the Other in English (and, I presume, in
French too) suggests a substantivation that I suspect does not pertain.
--- Since we're not really clear on "subsantivity", etc., you'd have to
spell out what "substantiviation" means here.
Michaeo: The problem of capitalization of Dasein is something inherent in
this term's German origins, but the habit of making substantives and
sticking a 'the' in front seems a problematic procedure in philosophical
discourse. I propose a mode of writing that makes a difference between the
substantiated discourse of metaphysics (with its origins in the third
person) on the one hand, and another dimension o f the second person
requiring a completely different language on the other. (Buber was one of
the first to try this, but he did not have any of the means of
phenomenology at his disposal.) This dovetails with my concerns about
developing a sensitivity for presencing, standing and otherwise (inclined,
declined, enclitic, undefined, unconfined, etc.).
--- I see what you are saying, but the idea of the maintenance of a strict
division between the "you" and the "one" is itself highly questionable.
And questionable perhaps *first* because of the potential violence of any
rigid topology. Also: why "standing" presence? Does presence ever really
sit still? Isn't "standing presence" the expansion of "presence at hand"?
Michael: So I am relieved when you write: "The designation
"thematic-substantive" is meant in a *very minimal and provisional way*".
Michael: Paul Murphy has brought in the theme of bodiliness in the context
of suffering. I did not at all want to suggest that the phenomenon of
bodiliness was be yond thinking (my qualms are about morals and morally
loaded questions). Nor do I think that Heidegger had a deprecating
attitude towards bodiliness (Paul: "bodily experience is only Erlebnis,
lived experience, somatic tingling severed from genuine Erfahrung").
Rather, he regards it as one of the hardest things to gain a view of
phenomenologically. (So it is not the case that "bodily experience [in
Heidegger's view] is not at all open to the revealing / concealing of
Being" (Paul).) The whole problematic of moodedness is tied up with the
phenomenon of bodiliness which is in turn perhaps the prime condition of
dasein's finiteness.
--- Well, he considers it *difficult*, but he doesn't really go after it,
either. "Being" was hard, but that didn't stop him. But he's just one guy,
after all... :) I find your comments interesting.
Michael: And the animals: here it seems just as difficult to say anything
de-finitive.
--- Hmmm: "the animals"....
--- So don't say something definitive. Really, this takes us into the
moral "calculus" in special ways, precisely because of the lack of
definition. The "ought" is precisely what has to guide us here. I'm a
vegetarian. I don't mean to play "holier than thou" here, but the point is
that in the lack of knowledge, how do we choose?
Michael: For Heidegger, the openness to beyng...
--- Perhaps I should ask here, why the "y"? Is there a difference between
"y" and "B"?
Michael (continuation of interrupted sentence): ...is pretty much
equivalent to the openness to language (or the compulsion to speak). He
follows Aristotle in the distinction between aisthesis and noein. Since
animals cannot speak (yet) , there does not seem much hope of saying what
they are open to.
--- What right have we to posit a total absence of language here? I mean,
you ask this question, too. But it's morality remains, er, "repressed".
Michael: Perhaps there are transitions and passageways between having
language and being open to the AS. Sensitive thinking about the mysteries
of our own bodiliness may provide clues to animal-being.
--- Again, very interesting.
Regards to you both,
Michael
--- Regards to you, too,
--- Tom B.
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