Interacting with Iain, whose comments are unmarked, while mine are
preceded by a triple dash (---).
But, at the same time, it seems pretty clear to me that Heidegger thought
of the 'factical' Holocaust as an ontic symptom of an ontological
"catastrophe" or "disaster" [Katastrophe]:
"This fall [Abfall] into the nonessence of himself is uncanny [hat darin
sein Unheimliches] in that it always seems harmless, in that business and
pleasure go on just as before, in that it doesn't seem so important what
and how one thinks; until one day the catastrophe [Katastrophe] is
there--a day that needs perhaps centuries to rise from the night of
increasing thoughtlessness [Gedanklosigkeit]. Neither moral nor cultural
nor political standards extend to the dimension of responsibility
[Verantwortung] in which thinking is placed [gestellt] in accordance with
its essence." [1939: N3 112/NI 603]
Is it the fact that even his supporters didn't like what Heidegger had to
say about the Holocaust/Shoah (and for Heidegger the Q of 'Shoah' vs.
'Holocaust' is also the Q of our future paths in a Janus-Headed epoch of
Enframing; the greatest danger and its possibility of the saving-power)
that has lead so many for so long to maintain that Heidegger 'said
nothing' about the Holocaust? Anyone who would talk about 'Heidegger's
shameful silence' needs to read the Nietzsche lectures--if only from there
perhaps to re-raise the Q of shame (and its exhibitionistic expression)
in connection with his more infamous utterances, e.g., about the gas
chambers and the motorized agricultural industry being of the same
essence). If the saving-power if to be found in the greatest danger, then
it is (for Heidegger) the fact that the Holocaust is a factical expression
of ontological Seinsvergessenehit (and, suggestively, the 'oblivion' of
Being) that holds out the hope: our recognizing this oblivion of Being
>from out of this disaster--that is for Heidegger the redemptive
possibility inherent in this tragedy. (Who has the right to interpret
this event? No one? Must it be remembered in its uninterpretability as
pure disaster? That may be what 'Shoah' connotes.)
--- Indeed. Who has the right to interpret this event? Yes indeedy.
--- One approach to this problem might be a kind of historical "archiving"
project not concerned with archiving actual testimonies (this is of course
being done thoroughly already), but by having a kind of "contest" wherein
interested parties (historians, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists,
others) submit a kind of piece of writing, or several, in which they
themselves compose something like narrative of how they imagine a time in
the camps to have been, perhaps doing so in a number of preselected forms,
which would then be judged by participating survivors for their
"veracity", so to speak. The work would then be "graded" on some scale.
This would have no official binding power whatsoever, but could be included
with the authors' resume, credentials, etc., as a kind of passing-on
process. I'd defend this idea, despite its sounding "off the wall", to
some considerable extent before tossing it out altogether. (One chief line
of defense, and criticism, is that such a process is probably already at
work in various ways.)
--- And, who has the right *not* to try to interpret this event? But only
if interpretation is humble can it be up the the calling, only if
interpretation is precisely that: interpretation.
--- And it must be noted that it is *not the only disaster*.
--- But isn't the oblivion really the oblivion of nonviolence? Isn't the
falling from essence a falling from essence as nonviolence at the expense
of another *essential hubris*? Even seen in light of Socratic justice as
"administration" among essences, this would seem to be the case. It is,
above all, a failing of justice, it appears to me from here, and the
*success* and *achievement*, if for but a short, "glorious" time, to
paraphrase Heidegger, of one language of Being and one Dasein: That of
National Socialism and the Weimar Republic. For that language is
Nietzschean, in a bad, watered-down version, but testifies for Nietzsche's
dynamite and even his strategy, however fateful or tragic.
Raising the Q (what Blanchot, Nancy and others call) "the disaster," can
we also re-raise their concomitant question of the fate of the distinction
between Poiesis and Techne? Perhaps the 'good' that this western culture
still rewards is the good of techne, technical expertise, technique--and,
while technique is an indispensable element of poiesis (the artist must
have some technical know-how), what is lost when poiesis is lost is 'the
making,' the altering, the simple everyday possibilities of and for change
(evolutionary and revolutionary). Can technicity change the understanding
of Being it presupposes, or does it dangerously reify that understanding,
calling for poietic acts from within a technocracy, acts which perhaps
begin to call the conditions of that ontopolitical understanding into
question? (What are the conditions of redemption from/within Enframing?)
--- I think the sense of "technology" invoked here is simply a mistake.
What happened was not primarily a result of technology as the falling of
techne, unless one simply wishes to say that *polemos* was simply
struggling to find its proper home in the twentieth century. That won't
do, but I think it is implied. It is as if, in this Disaster, the
disasters of the preceding centuries (which were many) are to be viewed
as acceptable. Here I am guessing you will tell me I am naive. Anyhow, It
seems a genuinely bad thing to sum up the problem of Weimar and the Jews,
mental patients, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc., via technology.
It appears to me that the *primary* "summations" about the Disaster would
have to do, rather, with: displacement, punishment, hammering, the dream
of the whole and the One, hero worship, the constant crucifixion of what
is Other, strange and different, child rearing and discipline practices,
the logics of dominion and take-over, scapegoating, Christian
anti-semitism, the essence of violence, etc., and that technology as
technicity as a falling from techne as revealing rather spills out from
this basic ground. But *this is precisely the ground that Heidegger didn't
open up.* In fact, his reading of technology bears the marks of the
repression of nonviolence and the fundamental condition of the relation to
Others in its "veiled" polemos as a kind of underhanded indictment of what
is other than technology: "The essence of technology is nothing
technological..." I have always found those words haunting. Heidegger is
really overextending his "one thought", it appears to me.
We are treading here, none too lightly, over Qs (I would insist on the
plural) of violence. For Tom, my post >is a >classic case of the failure
to grasp the issue of (non)violence: violent >thought/action kills the
father, nonviolent thoughtaction approaches the >problem of the *tyrant*,
leaving *paternality* intact, albeit minus its >*dominance*. It is a
serious failing to attach *paternalism* as such, >since there are, after
all, fathers. Better to say, "the death of the >tyrant".
Tom has chastised me several times for suggesting the ubiquity of
violence. But who is being naive here?
--- I guess your play on "naive" is in reference to my emphasis on "non-
naivete" regarding nonviolence. You're not getting me, if this is what
you mean. I've contended that the naivete has to do precisely with the
fact of the ubiquity of violence, that any nonviolence must contend with
this and stand in the *gravity* of the possibility of violence and that
previaling nonviolence fails and is inauthentic precisely because it fails
to grasp this. Gravity, here a resonation with gravity as earth's pull (or
continually coming toward us) counter to standing, is the nearly the
essence of *ubiquity*. I haven't disagreed, nor, let me protest, have I
chastised, I think, unless you take careful disagreement as chastisement,
that violence is ubiquitous. On the contrary, I am contending that my
stance here is in fact the only genuinely realistic one.
Perhaps I can address three last points (Tom's, Patrick Murphy's Q of the
promise, and Paul Murphy's reconnection with Derrida's analysis) together:
We need Paul's reminder (of the pharmakon in Plato's pharmacy) to mitigate
Tom's (as a homeopathic counter-dose we should also address Heidegger's
readings of Plato, as Paul and Michael both suggest). On the page Paul
refers us to, Derrida writes: "Writing is parricidal." [Diss, 164]
Children replace their parents. (Writing writes over the past.) Tom's
dream, of killing only the father as tyrant, of leaving the good father
intact and alive, this is a dream which (perhaps unfortunately) flies in
the face of the existential reality to which Oedipus (to hardly mention
Freud's staging of the primal scene e.g. in Totem and Taboo) at Colonus
attests.
--- As for the pharmakon, the question I have is whether my own view here
does not in fact rest fundamentally in the condition of the pharmakon as
bivalent, and that standing in nonviolence is precisely founded on this
*possibility* of either. For, while the pharmakon is either poison or
cure, it does not appear to me that Socrates is saying that one should be
poisoning people, let alone with Zyclon-B. Perhaps, rather, what is
going on here is a situation of *meta-physics*, where the physical element
of the poison-cure is shown in its power as *danger or therapos*, which is
to say, it is itself the projection the power as danger's gravity and
hope's promise. Isn't the possibility of *poison* the *gravity* of the
pharmakon? Isn't the *concern for danger* part of what the thinking of the
pharmakon is about? While it is true that it can be turned over and over
in its indecideability and aporetic nature, perhaps the *aporia* itself
reaches, along with Western metaphysics, a certain standing end, which
itself could be something of a gift of freedom wherein nonviolence can
recuperate itself rather than engaging in dreary repetition. Indeed, it
could be suggested here that even Derrida's "play" in the indecideable,
with its grounding in a sense of "decision" which appears to me to be
rather conservative (e.g., the moment of decision as discussed in _The
Force of Law_) marks a certain *fruition* of a *capitalism* inherent in
Derrida's trajectory, foreclosing what appears to me to be a better
thinking of justice at whose edge Derrida decidely stands. For it is
precisely such a capitalism (whether present in Derrida or not) that marks
the chief falling of nonviolence, a capitalism especially evident in the
academy, it seems to me, in that in the academy the moral issue is used to
power the text, rather than the other way around.
--- Perhaps we can question Oedipus, and after all, for Freud, the Oedipus
complex is something to be overcome, no, let me say, *resolved*, and not
something which is to lead to the death of the father, or is, rather, a
neurosis or psychosis as long as it maintains itself in that structure. It
could be, in fact, that *wherever there is peace-making*, conflict
resolution, departures from the retribution and revenge, etc., and these
departures do *and must* occur -- and I will have the good faith to assume
that you view these as the best states of affairs, and that to which you
are fundamentally aligned (even if you don't know it) -- wherever there
are these things, the Oedipus conflict is being resolved. It is a definite
work that *can* be taken up. In the US, prison reform in favor of
restorative justice can be taken up. Textual readings in nonviolent
enstruction can occur. Psychoanalytic therapy (where this has not been
eliminated by the technicity of bio-pharmacological fascism). Conflict
resolution. Daytime talk shows mediated by therapists. Innumerable
practices are possible. But not only that. *These are in fact the only
practices you yourself are likely to truly and actively endorse, once you
are able to free yourself into your own authentic nonviolence*. Or,
perhaps you would prefer to see more prisons built in the US, or that
Haiti get its advice on administering justice from the US, or feel that
the ongoing embargo in Iraq killing 500,000 people and permanently
crippling a third of that country's population is a good idea? (I don't
mean this question as an incitement to riot!) I can only ask you to read
what I'm saying carefully and do what you can, should you wish to do so,
to see how I have rigorously distinguished myself from prevailing
activisms and thought concerning nonviolence. In this response to you, I'm
leaving aside the "anti-Oedipus" of Deleuze and Guattari.
--- What of this parricide? Replacing is not parricide, and needn't be.
People do grow old and die, and the elderly can be revered, venerable old
pianists can go on playing and teaching, when a ballet dancer grows older,
he or she can become a teacher, tribal elders can be at least *listened
to*, etc. and we know these things take place. Oh, but that's not
*writing*, perhaps. (Much to ponder here.) And, if everyone, indeed, They,
do it, then we must also? But everyone is not doing it. And, no, writing
is not essentially parricidal. Derrida is wrong. Parricide is parricide,
writing is writing. The child who commits parricide does so because the
parent will not share power. This means that the child must kill in order
to Be. If writing is parricidal, it means that the regime of dominion
dominates to the extent of writing. I don't buy it. It is a recapitulation
of the dominion of dominion to equate the two. If Arendt can question
dominion as such, does this make her a mere dreamer, or has she not, in
saying that only in conditions of political freedom is thought possible,
simply articulated *most realistically* and most responsibly one of the
primary conditions we face? Are we not rather fully involved in the very
struggle for the freedom *from dominion*? But the freedom *from dominion*
is at the same time the *freedom from parricide*. This means that
nonviolence is precisely the struggle (and saving power) that arises in
the face of parricide, and refuses parricide. As a struggle, it may have
to put itself on the line for this, and take the violent father's spear,
perhaps again and again.
--- A hopeless project? A project? A hope? There is a history of
nonviolence. It is a minority history, but it is there, and is definite,
and, crucial to your points here, *there is also a history of nonviolence
so ubiquitous that it is invisible to many*. It is here in our
conversation, wherever something like "good will" obtains, wherever people
get up and have breakfast and a laugh or a hug, where couples make love,
friends have coffee, etc. The fact of the matter is that deprived of the
clarity of the *cut* of parricide, many lose their heads in the face of
the multiplicity and the refusal to budge of physis, in its slower
emergences. In this often all too ungrounded discourse, ungrounded perhaps
because of flight *from the charge of the moral*, the star of parricide
shines with an attractive brightness. The history of Christianity is, of
course, with its *ubiquitous* parricidal image, a prime case of such a
stellar phenomenon of world-organization.
--- What of this "existential reality"? Is this phrase possible in a
serious discussion of Heidegger? And doesn't this point to what is also
"Existentialism's" (Heidegger, forgive me) worst tendency to be of the
status quo? Indeed, any thought of existence which would be in contention
with the status quo would be an insistent being, not an eksistent one.
Didn't Heidegger already clarify that existence meant, for the Greeks, a
passing out of being, a non-being (*existasthai*, in _Introduction to
Metaphysics_ in the etymology section) and not an ec-stasis, the
*opposite* of what is meant by "existence" in the Heideggerian sense? Are
you concerned with truth, which, via Heidegger already wears the clothes
of the mountain man, the journeyman, and is prepared for cold, the
minority position, the Nietzschean winds, or "reality", which appears to me
to be complacency? Recall the phrase from Sartre: "It's not what you make
of yourself, but what you make of what others have made of you." That's
very nice, but virtually *every single serious struggle of our time*, for
example, racism, runs counter to this philosophy, and rather contends that
what is at issue is *not* "adjustment to life", but rather fundamental
change of the views *of others*, persuasion. For Sartre, anti-semitism
amounted to such a crisis: anti-semitism, a making-evil of someone who is
Jewish, amounted to *more than a mere "making-of"* as a *view*, but a
*program* to be confronted, even when bodies are not touched. To grasp
this form of conflict requires the most "insistential" opening to the
other, being with the other, *persuasion* as such, and nonviolence.
Nonviolence is crucial simply because change bought by coercion is simply
not true change, and revenge is an illusion.
Petar Ramadanovic asks 'Who' the father is. That is precisely the Q., and
these texts address the way life-in-time 'plays-out' the *changing*
answers to that Q (documenting certain perils inherent to the process of
transmission as well as providing a kind of program for successful
transmission). Patrick raises the Q of the promise, and here we have to
remember that Oedipus ellicits the promise from Theseus, who is not Oed's
son but who is the King--and who has thus inherited the mantle from
Oedipus (and thus is, in a sense, the true son). I would thus say that it
is not so much a Q of good fathers (or mothers!) as of good children.
What this means is that, given the fact of generation(s)--the fact about
temporaly finite beings that we re-place those who came before--we
*filter* the past for the sake of the future. This process is what
Heidegger calls 'heritage' (over against a reifying 'tradition'). This
simple existential faktung leads to an ethical responsibility for what we
transmit to the future; we have to take responsibility for the inevitable
filtration that goes on as we mediate the transmission of intelligibility
through time. We can't not kill the father, sadly, but we may be able not
to kill the children, hopefully, Iain
--- It's not a done deal as to whether we can't kill the father.
Nonviolence never really *kills*, for example. This does not mean that one
standing in nonviolence can't or won't take a brick and smash the head of
a rapist in the act of raping someone. That is not killing, if it is done
solely to prevent the rape from occuring, and not in order to bring out
the death of the rapist. Intent is crucial here. Such a standing is
possible, and in fact, it's standard fare, *even for police*, and is
fundamentally involved in legalities concerning firing on attackers, etc.
Even "shooting to kill" is not a "killing" in the meaningful sense that
could develop in a play, in a certain sense. Again, I'm not being naive (I
claim): rather, the naivete lies with those who charge the scene of
killing with so many parricidal and homicidal motifs, *against the
factual, legal, historical emergence of nonviolence*.
--- In any event, the "good" of which you speak is, specifically,
nonviolence, so far as I can tell.
--- As for the "children", and the fathers, perhaps a great deal lies in
this sense of the unalterable past, a past which may either be "filtered"
or mechanically repeated. Perhaps, on the contrary, and has been said by
both Foucault and by Gandhi (this brown-skinned man who I insist on
insinuating into philosophical discourse), what is in question is in part
the very view that History is a done deal, that the past is "as necessary
as all that", that fundamental change in the present only departs from a
past, but never re-reads it. And it should be borne in mind that the idea
of "filtering" can *also* take place in political control of media.
Regards,
Tom B.
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