On 20 Aug 1996, robert scheetz wrote:
> Tom B.,
>
> Wonderfull "polemic".
> May be, despite himself, you've rescued H from scholasticism.
>
> The horror of existential circumstance ("the nightmare of history":
> parricide, fratricide, infanticide...Diana Ortiz,Desert Storm,
> Auschwitz,...) is the guilt burden of Everyman from Oedipus to us.
> That the philosopher-genius-of-the-age should be abstracted
> from this would seem an impossibility?..."lucky", maybe?
>
>
>
> --- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>
And let's not forget "the only positive act", suicide...
The horror is a call to re-think guilt and to free its drama from
identification of locus to its conditions of possibility, and unleashs its
moral imminance, intention and imprisoned knowledge to its authentic
fruition as nonviolence, while the burdening of guilt promises, in spite
of every *liberation*, liberation theology, etc., only and ever to break
the back of nonviolence, which carries Christianity, for example, like a
cross. (In the news in the last couple of days, gunmen fired in the
Haitian presidential palace.)
That "genius" (Heidegger's, unless you mean, rather a *locus*, something
more gen-eral, I hope), which *can only rescue itself*, and which is also
physis in both the self-having/being of emergence and its being beheld in
others is precisely also everyman's -- though *not* for that reason
stellar, but in fact hidden by everyman's Stars and star phenomena, such
as Heidegger('s) -- despite the history of Genius, which is in part a
history of the *capitalism* of the attribution to *how*, and a history of
at-tributions in general: to luck, to will, to ability, to talent, genius,
difficulty, means, method, strategy, etc. as fundamental to nonviolence in
its moments of primordial genius and empowerment. Luck? Does the
*attribution* to luck not therefore deserve consideration, and would such
an "abstraction" (such as, and whatever, it is) not itself be founded on
the refusal of both the attribution to luck and to will, and therefore
affirming *both at the same time*, maintaining rather the irreducible,
hybrid insistent in-between, in the "mid-zone"? Yet, there is the
destinal, but this can only prompt us to renew with new vigor our resolve;
its abyss our slingshot, its delights our own, and our horror, as well.
Tom B.
_____________________________________________________________________
"I'll take my coffee without sugar produced in slave labor camps, on third
world plantations or by prison chain gangs, thank you. The same goes for
the coffee itself, naturally."
_____________________________________________________________________
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---