It looks like there's been a fair bit going on while I was away for the weekend. Just some thoughts and associations which have come to mind. This whole discussion of violence and martyrs is fascinating. The phenomenon of the martyr held up as example may be a way of bringing ones own potentiality for death home, a way of bringing up the question of one reaction to violence.
If you look at it that way, violence has a very real and neccessary role in representing existence to us. The martyr (in the real sense of a witness) IS the attestation to existence. I'd like to bring up the Flannery O'Connor story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" in which the misfit says of the old woman (quoting inexactly) 'She would have been a wonderful woman if there'd been someone there to shoot her every day of her life'. In that case, violence has everything to do with authenticity. Can the call to conscience be violent?
Heidegger, too, uses violence as a literary device to cut through the 'obvious' significations of temporality with "violences ... that are not arbitrary but have a necessity grounded in the facts" [BT 327].
All this is to say nothing against the project of peace in our world (a project called for even made necessary by the state of that world I would say).
It was also pointed out that 'martyrs' are not necessarily 'good' (I think of the nihilists in "The Possessed" who go to their executions like the foolish mock-heros they are. Yet these comic characters have been able to commit the ultimate violence on Shatov). Violence and martydom has the signification of calling up the meaning of existence; an inquiry that Heidegger (in so far as he neglects faith and the good) by no means completes.
Authenticiy does not by any means mean 'good' or 'moral'. I'd say there's a definite authenticiy to the characters in the movie "Natural Born Killers" ("it's not that they don't know the difference between right and wrong, they just
don't give a damn"). I think that violence is the privledged way that we, in this culture, have chosen to represent the condition of existence and its possibilities (condition is probably the wrong word here). Maybe the movies culture and literature of modern America is a 'high point' of its own in the representation of violence/martyrdom. Hopefully we haven't gotten out of hand.
Maybe an understanding of what violence represents (authenticity? the sublime?) can lead into a reverence for it that will help us keep violence from destroying our society (any more), I don't know.
Also I am curious as to what the "discovery of violence" means. Do you mean some kind of a discovery that transcends the possibility of mere violence?
Tony Dowler
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