(Michael's remarks are unmarked, mine are preceded by a triple dash (---)).
Michael Eldred wrote:
There has obviously been a misunderstanding between me and Tom Blancato
regarding Verhaltenheit and its translation as either "composure" or
"restrainedness/reservedness".
--- To clarify a bit more, as I have pointed out, I did not mean to
question "composure" in light of "repression", as in inter-psychic
phenomenon, but as a world-comportment/mood, which I am sure is closer to
the sense that you meant. It is from that standpoint that I raise the
question of whether and how composure is prone to any variety of
corruptions as inauthentic, a veil covering the condition of
responsibility, a power enactment enforcing something, a denial of
something in what it constitutes as (mere) "fury". Indeed, a keen eye or
ear can often see in "fury" what is other than fury as tempest, or temper
tantrum: a plea for justice, an indication of rupture, an expression of
pain, a call to the other, and perhaps the *uniquely intelligible* call.
In my last post I retracted the translation as "composure", to which Tom
had responded, and instead offered some thoughts on "reservedness" related
specifically to the passage in the Beitraegen which I had originally
cited.
It's definitely true that I have not responded to all you have said, Tom.
--- But I didn't complain that you hadn't responded to *all* that I said,
but rather *enough*. There is a world of difference between these two
things.
I have chosen passages to which I have something to say, and I do not
grasp the compass of your motivation. But no matter, for you are Tom
Blancato, and I am Michael Eldred.
Not everything I have said has been specifically directed at you, e.g. the
sequences with "the charge of morality", and I am not simply accusing you
of stage-grabbing. I think on the contrary that I have let myself in for
considering your central concerns to some appreciable extent.
--- Point taken.
I have pointed out where I regard that much more detailed connections have
to worked out between the question of violence and essential aspects of
the thinking of beyng, to wit: aletheia, the understanding of being as
standing presence, the steps back, among other aspects. Your positing of a
question of violence is in a way your own creative act with its own
'violence', but this is fair enough. The violence has to be carried
through.
--- Here I disagree. I don't think there really is much violence in my
positing. I have also fully recognized the validity of those substantive
issues to which you point.
I doubt very much whether the oblivion to being can be interpreted as a
violence done to beyng, for this puts or leaves human beings on centre
stage once again.
--- By your reading of the "center stage", the reading of the forgetting
of Being as a violence (and I do not mean that it is/was totally such a
violence) would identify that violence as having taken place as the *being
in center stage*. To cite the history of violence *as taking center
stage* "puts human beings" "in center stage" only in a restricted sense as
the recounting of that very violence and errance (let me clearly identify
both violence and errance.) To (perhaps slavishly) respond to the
desideratum of "not putting in center stage" to the point of even omitting
the historical recounting of the self-putting-in-center-stage of Dasein
(for Dasein is Dasein even when it forgets itself and understands itself
as human being) is a predisposition which has to be guarded against.
Is there an inherent anthopocentrism in the question of violence as you
have posed it?
--- Not necessarily. It may be the violence *of* anthropocentrism that is
being identified.
The oblivion to beyng is the event of beyng's own epoche (reservedness,
its holding-itself-back). I do not think this can be understood as beyng
doing violence to itself.
--- Why not?
Is Heraclitean polemos the violence of being itself which uses beings and
human beings to e-rect a world in its standingness in the open space of
unconcealment?
--- I think to some extent Heidegger would have (had) it that way. But I
think that in Heidegger the virility of the great, and virility in
general, according to some very intrinsic logics, continually hides itself
>from the question of violence as such, so that when polemos is invoked or
identified, it is always a foregone conclusion that the violence of
polemos (which is not all that polemos *is*) is not to be shrunk from, and
I get the sense that any question of violence as such is, in some first
instance, according to wholly assumed protocols of virility, consigned
only and ever to a shrinking only. This is why I said before that the
question of violence can not be posed unless there is room for thought,
and if all such thought (as a certain suspension of action or readiness to
action) is taken as impotence, then thought is not possible in that realm
(I formulated this poorly there, in a specific logical sense, by the way.)
--- Let me point again simply to the "how is it with being", considered by
Heidegger to be so crucial a preliminary to the disclosure of Being. In
his "state of The Being address", so to speak, there is simply no direct
mention of violence *per se*. Yet the alarm he clearly has implies
*everywhere* that what is *at issue* in pincers of Russia and the USA, in
the armed peace of Europe, in the blind technological fury, etc., *is
violence*. I contend that it is precisely *violence* that is the inner
meaning of these alarms at the "state of Being". (I'm leaving aside the
obvious, dangerous, tragic mentions of race, of nation, the rhetoric of
greatness, the veiled critiques of German culture, hero worship -- this
whole ambiguous, brilliant, alarming play in Heideggers gestures here.)
There is a kind of direction, indeed, an *inclination* by which Being may
*find itself* as nonviolence. Could it be, indeed, that the seeds of
Being's being-forgotten was in fact grounded in precisely its very
*standing*?
The style of Verhaltenheit/reservedness/restrainedness cannot be read
prescriptively, that is, unless one wants to do violence to the aethos of
phenomenological thinking.
--- Perhaps so, but I still sense a prescriptive gesture in your
invocation.
I read it rather as a presentiment of the mood of the transition to the
other beginning. The advent of the transition is marked by the event
'Heidegger' in the twenties. Since then we (few) are living in the epoch
of the advent of the thinking of beyng.
--- Advental stuff is tricky.
So I heartily disagree that there is or has been a thinking of being
itself apart from the event Heidegger, just as little a there has been a
thinking of the being of beings apart from the event 'Plato/Aristotle',
who were used by the advent of the being of beings to bring it to
thought-ful language.
--- Thinking of being: perhaps, perhaps not. There has, to be sure, and by
Heidegger's specific provision, been understanding of Being, and not only
that (hehehe): it occurs for "all of us", even if it grazes us just once
in our lives, etc. It is crucial to retain this, and furthermore to stand
with some humility before the notion that others may have understandings
in languages we do not understand, or in spite of poor language, etc.
Humility!
Heidegger has certainly focussed on the 'violence' of technology with its
origins in the opening of the being of beings to techne. But technology
here has to be understood in a very broad sense as all grabbing of beings
under the guidance of a knowing in-sight. His explication of the essencing
of technology as the set- up (or enframement) neglects the capitalist garb
of this grasp on beings. And there has been scant attention paid in
Heidegger to the other person, bodiliness, intimacy (within which I would
situate your reference to sexuality). These are desiderata that have moved
and continue to move my own thinking.
--- No question, technology as enframing/gestell. But I am saying that his
understanding of the State of Being is precisely restricted in this way:
look for your self. How, by 1935, say, and certainly, after that war,
could one not also say, directly, *violence*? This is no obviation of
technology. I think it is a straight out failure to face violence head on.
The ambiguity in the Ghandhi quote is interesting, don't you think?
--- Here I must beg some forgiveness: I quoted from memory, and in fact
recall two versions of this quote. When asked about Western Civilization,
Gandhi said either "I think it should be tried" or "It would be a good
idea." The joke in your question, if we take the former formulation as the
"true quote", is that a *trial* for Gandhi would be *anything* but what is
implied in the Western sense of justice. Gandhi's legal practice, and
indeed, his self-admitted weakness as a lawyer, was that he could not
abide by the litigational logics of the trial, and rather strove to
dignify all disputing parties, to work for reconciliation outside of the
court arena altogether (something which is, in fact, and by historical
precedent even within the legal systems of the West, entirely possible and
consistently more effective, if Being has the inclination to recognize
this.)
Cheers and regards,
--- Regards again,
--- Tom B.
Michael
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