On Fri, 2 Aug 1996, Michael D. Pennamacoor wrote:
> Tom Blancato recently:
>
> >for nonviolence is *constantly* disagreeing with
> >polemos, with the agreement of polemos.
>
> Has Tom noticed the lengthy discussions a week or so ago on the meaning of
> 'polemos'? The point is that the meaning of the word is one connection with
> Heideggerian thinking. If polemos is more a-kin to necessary strife and
> a-parting in the heart of Being rather than some notion of war or violence
> then this raises a question as to the relation between the setting-a-part
> of what sets-together and violence (or war or "dis-agreement"). More simply
> put: strife (in the non-virile Heraclitorical sense)
When did Heraclitus get a clitorus? Is the sense of strive in Heraclitus
really "not at all" violent?
is not at all
> violence, thus to op-pose nonviolence with it is very question-worthy and
> very virile too! What's the beef with polemos and the polemical?
As a mode of disclosure, as, for instance, in the setting of law, the
litigation process, which seems to me to be adequately described as a
polemical process, produces a restrictive mode of truth. The US criminal
justice system, based on this ad-versarial framework and setting-apart,
is currently undergoing an historically unprecedented rise in the number
of prisons and has the highest prison poplulation in the world. Likewise,
the political settings which capitalize on these atrocities (for the
prison houses are indeed atro-cities) are utterly *polemica*. Virtually
all of the routes of amelioration *require* a rethinking of the polemical
attitude. The capacity to rethink and project new possibilities is
systematically levelled over when people return to their camps.
The
> utterly intrusive and invasive are not of the same cloth as the struggling
> and striving of polemos: I would even go so far as to say that one version
> of nonviolence might be precisely what struggles in balance (and keeps the
> world a world -- where nothing 'wins' thus maintaining constant change)
> --polemos.
This presumes polemos as the founding organizing principle of the world,
and nonviolence plays the role of adjudicator. As I've said, I think
nonviolence *includes* polemos as part of its repertoire of "theaters",
arenas, openings, etc. The shift is in what is *central*, world-founding,
world-organizing, etc: polemos or nonviolence? But, you insist, polemos is
not really violent. I think, on the contrary, it is violent: the violence
of violence is not in the rupture (the essence of violence is nothing
violent), but in the entire worlding of the moment of violence. That
worlding appears to me to be polemos. The sense of strife you mention does
not yet convince me otherwise.
>
> My Pain
>
Sorry you're in pain, d00d,
Tom B.
>
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>
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"I'll take my coffee without sugar produced in slave labor camps, third
world plantations and by prison chain gangs, thank you."
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