Paul's comments are unmarked, mine are preceded by a triple dash (---).
Paul Murphy wrote:
Bob Scheetz's approbation aside...
I gave up on Tom Blancato's 'polemic' half-way, as I just didn't see the
point. It struck me as little more than heavy-handed sarcasm. But maybe
I'm just too obtuse.
--- It had points and only moments of sarcasm, I think.
I would like to respond to one of Mr. Blancato's recent, voluminous posts
(one of these days my e-mail reader is going to collapse!). He gainsays
the Derridean line, "Writing is parricide" with a curt "no it isn't". This
seems to miss the point. Of course with JD one is taking a risk by
appealing to 'context', since the context is never fixed or determinate
etc. etc., but still, this line from "Plato's Pharmacy" should be read in
context.
--- On the contrary, nowhere is context more important. But *even so*, for
the time being I'm going to stand by my comment about parricide.
Derrida is largely preoccupied with the "Phaedrus" denunciation of writing
as parasitic upon living speech, doubling, supplementing, usurping the
originary generative- engendering (seminal) power of the speaker-father's
pure word. Hence for Plato writing acts in a parricidal fashion, bringing
about "the disappearance of the good- father-capital-sun" (p.168,
_Dissemination_, English trans.). The charge of 'parricide' delivered to
writing is one of many phallo-logocentric gestures constitutive of the
metaphysics of presence, instituting the solar reign of metaphysical
economy.
--- Right.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, Tom, but you often seem to want to
literalize. Parricide = murder = violence in your books, reducing whatever
'symbolic' or hermeneutic role the term might play.
--- I don't think what I'm dosaying here is a literalization. Without
"literalization", there remains the logic and meaning of parricide. And,
on the other hand, as I've said repeatedly, I am holding that something
like parricide simply can not be separated from "literal" murder, as well.
Though, here the very meaning of "literal" should come into question. When
Derrida speaks of parricide, there can be no mistake that the resonance
and meanings involved have to do with "father" and "murder". What counts
as a father, as murder, as violence? You could have raised the same
question about *violence* to me here, vis a vis Derrida, and again, I
don't think violence is being utterly transposed over into a
"non-literal" realm, or, perhaps better put, a non-physical realm. The
very division literal-figurative or physical-psychical is displaced in
what I would tend to think of as *essential*: essential murder, essential
violence, etc.
'Violence' -- the very Q you wish to pose -- seems to undergo a similar
operation, to the extent that rape and murder are placed alongside
Heraclitean polemos and the politico- economic violence of sanctions
against states, eliding the manifold differences across the field.
--- Yes, to a certain extent, I think that is what I'm doing. But that is
not a literalization, but, as you say, a placing alongside. And, no, this
does not simply elide differences, nor usurp the one meaning for the
other. In the development of the question of violence, I am given then to
speak of *essential violence*, as a kind of "ontological intensiver and
clarifier", utterly dependent on a passage through a Heideggerian kind of
thinking.
The thinking of being is made subordinate to geopolitics-sociology-
anthropology, so that _Being and Time_ is measured against the yardstick
of the training of the police in Haiti (the point of which I still don't
understand, except as another instance of the Great Satan ganging up on
the Third World, leaving aside the fact that the Tonton Macoutes were
hardly adherents to Gandhian satyagraha).
--- No. There is no such making-subordinate. In the schema by which you
are attempting to read me, it's all a matter of superordination or
subordination, higher and lower, absolute or hierarchical priority. Not
only am I *not* doing that, what I am doing is *substantively engaged with
the very issue of ordination, "levels", etc.*
--- I don't understand what your point about the Macoutes is here. I know
they were hardly adherents of satyagraha. The point is that the strongest
tendency in Haiti is one towards nonviolence, non-revenge, etc. But what
has happened as that these tendencies have taken the form of an *alienated
nonviolence* which can't find its footings because of the
metaphysical/spiritual commitments which continually thrust its thinking
into an entrapping framework of understanding, a situation in which the
call to *think* and the *question of Being* are of preeminent, if
unrecognized, importance. I point to *thoughtaction*, and never simply to
"thought" or "action", in this regard, which is also meant to *resonate,
precisely, with satyagraha*.
I would be happy to be disabused of whatever misinterpretation of your
position I may be expounding. I await your next 30kilobyte message...
--- Regards, Tom B.
Best regards,
Paul N. Murphy
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---