Cologne, 8 August 1996
To reply to some of Tom Blancato's thoughts:
I wrote:-
"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."
To which Tom responded:
"--- 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."
I am not implying beyng as violence is on centre stage, but that to interpret
the oblivion to beyng as a violence done to beyng by human being would make
humans the agents/subjects of the oblivion and in this sense put them or leave
them 'on centre stage'. Dasein as an event in the history of beyng whereby the
essencing of truth turns, thus using humans in an event-ful way, precludes a
centre-staging of human beings. It has been and continues to be the rational
animal on centre stage: The being of beings is centred on the human rationality
that takes it in, i.e. understands and knows it. Da-sein, whose advent comes
with the turning, is no longer in the centre bent _at all costs_ on
understanding but instead itself ex-posed to the opening of the truth of beyng.
This opening is the Ab-Grund, the ab-sence of ground, i.e. the ab-sence of
reason.
ME wrote:
"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."
Tom responded:
--- Why not?
If the oblivion to beyng is beyng's own event, i.e. nothing other than the
metaphysical event-uation of beyng itself, how is a violence to be construed? A
violence would presume a violence done against a resistance, say, of beyng
resisting oblivion. But then beyng would not hold itself back, but be held back
- by what? Itself?
ME wrote:
"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?"
Tom responded:
"--- 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"
The violence of polemos I have hinted at is a violence done to beings to bring
them to stand as such and, co-respondingly (in answer), to human beings to bring
them to stand in the face of the being of beings revealing themselves in their
stat-ic limits to human under-standing. This, I agree, can very well be called
virility, manliness, masculinity. Metaphysics, in which polemos culminates,
could thus be interpreted (in retrospect, from today looking back at the Greek
beginning) as the event of vir-ility, man-liness, andreia: beings as such and
humans as such coming to stand in the openness of aletheia (without aletheia
itself having been thought). The "protocols of virility", as you put it, are
present in Heidegger in multifarious ways (but there are not only such calls to
manliness in Heidegger) and are question-able. If polemos is the forging of a
world in its openness through the violence (in the sense that a storm can be
violent) of shaping up beings to stand in their being and for the under-standing
of (rational) human beings, then the step back to see the worlding of the world
itself is already one step removed from this standing-ness, this stat-ic, this
sis-tence. Aletheia could then be the openness of the there for da-sein in which
not only standing presence event-uates. A non-standingness of presencing, which
remains a task for thinking, would then be related to the non-violence central
to your concerns and provide the *non* in nonviolence with a sense (i.e. a
direction). The other in the search for an alternative to metaphysical standing
presence has to thought from the declination of standing presence into alterity.
Enclitical presencing is one possible positive title for non-standing
presencing, but this still has to be unfolded phenomenologically in its various
senses. I am suggesting that the essence of violence is the standingness
(sis-tence) of presence in the sense that polemos brings beings AS such to stand
in a world for under-standing human being. (An alternative translation of
"staendige Anwesung" is thus 'sis-tent presencing', just as unwieldy as
'standing presencing'.)
To move in the direction of what I provisionally call encliticality would mean
putting the schema of form and content/matter in aesthetics more radically into
question than Heidegger does in 'On the Origin of the Work of Art'. For 'form'
is morphe, idea, i.e. it is the very limits within which beings come to stand.
For the Greeks any sort of formlessness and limitlessness (apeiron) was
encountered with abhorrence. This abhorrence is for us a metaphysical heritage.
Regards,
Michael
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