Authenticity/violence/torture 2
I'm going to let this long, unweildy, and not very
professional discussion "fall", in a way, here. I am
approaching Heidegger as if there is a suspension of a
fundamental and primordial ground which I call the
"positivities". On the basis of these posivitivies, in
primoridial responsibility, violence, nonviolence and
guilt are possible. I'm acting as though there haven't
been discussions concerning violence, but there have.
Levinas in some ways (and I have read very little
Levinas), Arendt's "On Violence", Derrida on "Violence
and Metaphysics". Surely lots of other treatments occur
within something which could enter into dialogue with
readers of Heidegger.
I am letting go of pushing the discussion forward into
the elegant segue I'm looking for in this context into
the "discourse on violence", and this will be grist for
the mill for the progression. The progression is lost and
*can* be immediately recuperated by its very loss. How?
If our thinking here is to be contaminated by the
possibility of violence, we must be able to deal with the
question whether or not the sought for elegance or proper
integration into Heidegger's discourse is possible. We
are in a position to situate ourselves in the difference
between thought and action. Action presses: "we've got to
deal with violence, right away!"
The contamination here, not the only such "contamination"
possible, is the falling of a progression of thought in
order to move into the subject at issue. We are
questioning concerning violence. If our discourse on
existence, on the Being of beings, threatens to prevent
us from addressing violence, it will be accomplishing a
violence in so far as such an address is necessary and
possible. The distruptive urge of action, of the
political, breaks through the pristine ground of thought
(no matter how poor that thought is) in certain ways.
This disruption is not marginal to the issues and
questions here, but constitutes on of the prime moments
for which a discourse as such has some responsibility. It
is its contact point with violence. It is not the only
contact point with violence.
There are two modes of this address: one is spontaneous
and the other is reactive. Spontaneous address of
violence in the space of thoughtaction occurs within an
unbtrusive freedom. Reactive addressing of the question
takes place via a *justified* violence based on necessity
and a somehow proper maintenance of the ground of
nonviolence. I refer to this reactive addressing as
"avialance". Avialance is a deliberate bastardiation of
a-violence or nonviolence. The "-ance" is a deliberate
mispelling which signifies and examplifies, metanmically,
the *authorized and measured use of violence which is
transvaluationally secured as a desideratum of
nonviolence.* There is a deliberate resonance with the
term "differance", but the term "avialance" disrupts at
the same time some stylistic codes and has a certain
situationally and symbolic function. This can be likend
to Gandhi's use of the spinning wheel as a symbol of
nonviolence. The spinning wheel, as a symbol, and like
many political symbols, is quite specific and does not
attempt certain kinds of philosophical generalization
(absolute knowledge?), any more than the elephant or the
donkey can be understood as representing a truly general
concept concerning the respective US political parties
they represent.
I will ask you to bear with me here since this seems
quite a stretch. The moment of avialance here, again, is
the falling of the seemly discourse which attempts to
situate the question of violence within the horizion of
the thematics, but also the wisdom, of Heidegger.
Continuing in this vein: This is quite over my head. When
a swimmer gets in water over his or her head, s/he may
feel a certain rush of adrenaline which enable him or her
to get to the surface. This adrenaline is not the proper
energy of swimming, but it would be mistake not to
associate this energy and its manifestion somehow with
swimming. "In over his head" is also a typical academic
assessment of what happens in difficult discourses. Now
we may choose between two metaphors: of climbing soberly
down a ladder or being in over one's head.
This discourse passes from ("merely") academic (of
thought) into thoughtaction. From "there", back there,
where we were in a careful interaction with Heidegger, on
"his" terms, I suggest, we were not able to adequately
address the question of violence. May we do so from
"here"? I am not talking about moving from one figure-
head or authorial organizing name to another, not from
Heidegger to Arendt, for example.
I am in over my head. We might as well swim 'cause we
can't sink, we are told, if we are swimming at all, and
if we have a choice concerning the metaphor. We have
already lost, of course, just about anyone who is called
an activist. We have departed from the propriety of the
philosophical discourse, not in the direction of the
ultra-meta-philsophicality of the "other thinking" of the
fourfold. It may be that another thinking, or something
other, which is responsive to the same desiderata which
motivate Heidegger's move to "the other thinking" is
itself no longer what is called thinking.
In contrast to the heightened silence of the nameless in
which one should be able to dwell with a certain
contentment with not having much to say, I am attempting
to initiate, through spontaneous and reactive synthesis
the syn-thesis of thoughtaction. This seems very
grandiose. And I still haven't adequately indicated why
or how the discourse concerning violence must in certain
ways move outside of the home or confines of proper
philosophical, or even in some ways antiphilosophical
discourse.
My cheif contention was that Heidegger's discourse is on
the one hand responsive to the question of violence while
at the same time fails to open up this question. In
thinking through this problem concerning Foucault, I
picked up on a phrase someone used in describing Foucault
and some other writers: that he is in a certain sense
"white hot". This "heat" I will discuss below as a
certain "moral force". I think this heat operates in
Heideggers text. I have suggested that there are various
forms of "remove" (Heideggerian, Foucauldian, to cite
disparate examples) which are motivated by the question
of violence but which do not open the question directly.
I disrupted my own progression of thought through a
gesture of "avialance". I said I was "in over my head"
and activated the critical juncture of the "we must act"
(do) and "we must think" (say). If at this point, I
continue to think, I might not "make it" to the question
of violence adequately. I might, in fact, set myself on a
course that may take a Phd, or several generations of
thought to complete.
We know that we must think and that we must act ("right
away!"). This is the space of thoughtaction: the
activated difference between thought and action. There is
no sure *reason* as to why we are thus bound to
nonviolence in the process that we have available to us
at this stage. Nonviolence is an independent thematic-
substantive, just as is the question of Being. Being's
independence is the condition of the possibility of its
fateful self-grasping through the discourse of Heidegger,
as he sees things. And its independence at the same
participates in that which is the founding condition of
the essential *possibility* of violence. We might then
speak of a fateful self grasping of the question of
violence, the forgetting of the question of violence, and
the ground and constitutive always aready condition of
maintenence of Dasein within the possibility of violence
which may be inauthentic, authentic, alienated or
ruptured.
That which questions concerning violence must itself be
in proximity to violence as part of being wise, and what
is so wise must, in that proximity, act in responsibility
or bear the effects of violence (trauma/lack sustained by
self or others). Again, for Heidegger, the first word of
such trauma is "guilt". I think this is not the first
word, but the second word. The first word is "violence".
And this word is not properly delivered in Being and
Time. The position of the academic is the continuous
ground of the freedom to engage directly in action
concerning violence in favor of the payoff of sustained
research. In any event, for Heidegger, the effects of
violence in Being and Time amount to little than guilt
and the loss of being with for oneself.
We are seeking a discourse on "the positivities" which
arise out of the positivies. I have said that Heidegger
closes off the positivities and gives us a kind of
derivative version of them via the mechanism of guilt and
via the inhereing but unthematic question of violence.
How to make violence thematic? Any such discourse, for it
to attain to real veracity, must be "contaminated" by
violence in the non-objective relation to the problem of
violence. The good faith which allows the subjectivity of
the relation to violence parallels the good faith by
which the first person report of non-physical experience
(in a certain sense of physical and empirical) is
possible. The founding condition of this relation I will
refer to as the say-do complex. When we hold forth
concerning violence, a question will arise, in various
ways, after a long enough time, as to "what one is doing"
concerning this violence. Why? Because the distention of
the academic research is a distention of the "we must do"
with regards to violence. This distention can be dis-
alienated or positively alienated, or it can be
negatively alienated or develop into forgetfulness and
even rupture. The "health" and power of such a discourse
lies not in the continuous and smooth maintenance of a
positive alienation but in a back and forth movement
which disrupts the very discourse by returning to a non-
distended state.
A discourse concerning violence emanates and develops
from the basis of a kind of directive and project to "do
something" concerning violence. Such a discourse operates
in one of the primary distensions of Being-in-the-world:
the space of thought. The space of thought is bought and
paid for by the freedom to think in the negotiated
investment in thinking according to lived-world
desiderata: knowledge for its own sake, a positive and
definite alienation, infinite regional ontologies,
unlimited theoretics as have been vindicated, for
example, through the success of the creation of the
atomic bomb and other military researches and
accomplishments.
When it comes to the question of violence, in certain
ways the academic distention breaks down. Heidegger gives
us the means by which to identify the structural
alienation of regional ontology from the primary
ontological condition of Dasein, and his writing is
permeated with the call to recognize the limits of such
distention and its possibility for bad alienation. The
work of clarifying this alienation where this pertains to
the discourse, thought and research concerning violence
must in certain ways accomplish the "authentication" that
can occur in something like the movement of Being and
Time, but it must do so in a manner which is at the same
time a departure from that thinking. Being and Time, and
possibly the later thinking of Heidegger, bears
throughout the structures of its ground of the academic
distention. It is necessary to show how the cheif
authenticating movements and conditions displayed in
Being and Time are themselves unable to authenticate the
relation to the other and violence.
I wrote: "His writing is permeated with the call..." The
discourse concerning violence emerges out of the "stuff"
of this call. This stuff might be variously, and probably
must be various characterized as: force, power, love,
will to power, concern, care, responsibility, urgency,
urge, physis, crisis. I will use the word "force" to
signify this complex. In order to get to the question of
violence, this force must be *disalienated* and brought
into a kind of direct engagement in order to open the way
the condition of violence. But this disalienation means
at the same time an alienation from the systematic
disalienation of distended thought, of which even
Fundamental Ontology is an example. I have suggested that
the movement out of the distention might be a movement
into a hybrid condition of thought and action, which I am
calling thoughtaction with the "fateful" or "choiceful"
grasping of the independent thematic-substantive of
nonviolence, though that can be seen as metanym for any
number of hybrid complexs: powerknowledge, satyagraha
(truthforce), praxis (in some senses).
Just as Foucault *enjoys* writing about sexuality, that
is, he himself is imbued with the force of sexuality, and
I think here there is an implicit suggestion that his
writing would be incompetent were he not to enjoy, just
as we expect a writer on music to be musical in the
process, so must a writing on violence stand in the
relation to violence of the nonviolent, whatever that
relation is. We do not want to say that the writer must
themselves be violent. They must, however, stand in the
flux of the moral force, which is at the same time
standing in an robust experience of the positivities
which are done violence to in violence and in the
proximity by which the moral condition of responsibility
of the writer/thinker itself is brough into play.
In the end, it may be a matter of taste whether one
develops a smooth thought-space in which to approach the
question of violence, or instead vascillates between
something more distended and less distended. But really
the limitation on the smoothness pertains to the
limitations on the possibility of sustained thoughtful
discourse in the space of the political. Thus, it is
conditioned, but not "logically bound" to be the case,
that the discourse which is in responsible contact with
the problem of violence will not maintain itself in the
smoothness which characterizes the writings of people
like Heidegger and Foucault. It may as well be a matter
of skill, mood, tendency, factical conditions,
assessments of effectivness, etc. But whether smooth or
no, the space of the discourse concerning violence must
be a space of thoughtaction. If it remains a space of
thought only, it will become negatively alienated,
ruptured. It is not a logical operation that gives us to
this conclusion. We have suspended the search for this
logical operation out of the call to "get the point"
concerning violence, considering the stakes involved.
The main tendency of both Heidegger and Sartre, as
concerns their efforts to develop "fundamental
ontologies" is one which systematically separtes the
"moral plane" (to use a term appearing at the end of
Being and Nothingness) from the ontological. The plane is
essentially smooth and continuous. How is one to get *to*
the moral plane from the ontological plane? And are these
"planes" really so continuous, separable in the first
place?
The various continuities which go to make up the totality
of the geometricity of the plane as such are worth of
consideration. Various totalizations concerning limits,
propriety, speech and silence, theme, belonging, project,
all go into constituting the separation.
---
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.
Tom Blancato
tblancato@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
------------------
I'm going to let this long, unweildy, and not very
professional discussion "fall", in a way, here. I am
approaching Heidegger as if there is a suspension of a
fundamental and primordial ground which I call the
"positivities". On the basis of these posivitivies, in
primoridial responsibility, violence, nonviolence and
guilt are possible. I'm acting as though there haven't
been discussions concerning violence, but there have.
Levinas in some ways (and I have read very little
Levinas), Arendt's "On Violence", Derrida on "Violence
and Metaphysics". Surely lots of other treatments occur
within something which could enter into dialogue with
readers of Heidegger.
I am letting go of pushing the discussion forward into
the elegant segue I'm looking for in this context into
the "discourse on violence", and this will be grist for
the mill for the progression. The progression is lost and
*can* be immediately recuperated by its very loss. How?
If our thinking here is to be contaminated by the
possibility of violence, we must be able to deal with the
question whether or not the sought for elegance or proper
integration into Heidegger's discourse is possible. We
are in a position to situate ourselves in the difference
between thought and action. Action presses: "we've got to
deal with violence, right away!"
The contamination here, not the only such "contamination"
possible, is the falling of a progression of thought in
order to move into the subject at issue. We are
questioning concerning violence. If our discourse on
existence, on the Being of beings, threatens to prevent
us from addressing violence, it will be accomplishing a
violence in so far as such an address is necessary and
possible. The distruptive urge of action, of the
political, breaks through the pristine ground of thought
(no matter how poor that thought is) in certain ways.
This disruption is not marginal to the issues and
questions here, but constitutes on of the prime moments
for which a discourse as such has some responsibility. It
is its contact point with violence. It is not the only
contact point with violence.
There are two modes of this address: one is spontaneous
and the other is reactive. Spontaneous address of
violence in the space of thoughtaction occurs within an
unbtrusive freedom. Reactive addressing of the question
takes place via a *justified* violence based on necessity
and a somehow proper maintenance of the ground of
nonviolence. I refer to this reactive addressing as
"avialance". Avialance is a deliberate bastardiation of
a-violence or nonviolence. The "-ance" is a deliberate
mispelling which signifies and examplifies, metanmically,
the *authorized and measured use of violence which is
transvaluationally secured as a desideratum of
nonviolence.* There is a deliberate resonance with the
term "differance", but the term "avialance" disrupts at
the same time some stylistic codes and has a certain
situationally and symbolic function. This can be likend
to Gandhi's use of the spinning wheel as a symbol of
nonviolence. The spinning wheel, as a symbol, and like
many political symbols, is quite specific and does not
attempt certain kinds of philosophical generalization
(absolute knowledge?), any more than the elephant or the
donkey can be understood as representing a truly general
concept concerning the respective US political parties
they represent.
I will ask you to bear with me here since this seems
quite a stretch. The moment of avialance here, again, is
the falling of the seemly discourse which attempts to
situate the question of violence within the horizion of
the thematics, but also the wisdom, of Heidegger.
Continuing in this vein: This is quite over my head. When
a swimmer gets in water over his or her head, s/he may
feel a certain rush of adrenaline which enable him or her
to get to the surface. This adrenaline is not the proper
energy of swimming, but it would be mistake not to
associate this energy and its manifestion somehow with
swimming. "In over his head" is also a typical academic
assessment of what happens in difficult discourses. Now
we may choose between two metaphors: of climbing soberly
down a ladder or being in over one's head.
This discourse passes from ("merely") academic (of
thought) into thoughtaction. From "there", back there,
where we were in a careful interaction with Heidegger, on
"his" terms, I suggest, we were not able to adequately
address the question of violence. May we do so from
"here"? I am not talking about moving from one figure-
head or authorial organizing name to another, not from
Heidegger to Arendt, for example.
I am in over my head. We might as well swim 'cause we
can't sink, we are told, if we are swimming at all, and
if we have a choice concerning the metaphor. We have
already lost, of course, just about anyone who is called
an activist. We have departed from the propriety of the
philosophical discourse, not in the direction of the
ultra-meta-philsophicality of the "other thinking" of the
fourfold. It may be that another thinking, or something
other, which is responsive to the same desiderata which
motivate Heidegger's move to "the other thinking" is
itself no longer what is called thinking.
In contrast to the heightened silence of the nameless in
which one should be able to dwell with a certain
contentment with not having much to say, I am attempting
to initiate, through spontaneous and reactive synthesis
the syn-thesis of thoughtaction. This seems very
grandiose. And I still haven't adequately indicated why
or how the discourse concerning violence must in certain
ways move outside of the home or confines of proper
philosophical, or even in some ways antiphilosophical
discourse.
My cheif contention was that Heidegger's discourse is on
the one hand responsive to the question of violence while
at the same time fails to open up this question. In
thinking through this problem concerning Foucault, I
picked up on a phrase someone used in describing Foucault
and some other writers: that he is in a certain sense
"white hot". This "heat" I will discuss below as a
certain "moral force". I think this heat operates in
Heideggers text. I have suggested that there are various
forms of "remove" (Heideggerian, Foucauldian, to cite
disparate examples) which are motivated by the question
of violence but which do not open the question directly.
I disrupted my own progression of thought through a
gesture of "avialance". I said I was "in over my head"
and activated the critical juncture of the "we must act"
(do) and "we must think" (say). If at this point, I
continue to think, I might not "make it" to the question
of violence adequately. I might, in fact, set myself on a
course that may take a Phd, or several generations of
thought to complete.
We know that we must think and that we must act ("right
away!"). This is the space of thoughtaction: the
activated difference between thought and action. There is
no sure *reason* as to why we are thus bound to
nonviolence in the process that we have available to us
at this stage. Nonviolence is an independent thematic-
substantive, just as is the question of Being. Being's
independence is the condition of the possibility of its
fateful self-grasping through the discourse of Heidegger,
as he sees things. And its independence at the same
participates in that which is the founding condition of
the essential *possibility* of violence. We might then
speak of a fateful self grasping of the question of
violence, the forgetting of the question of violence, and
the ground and constitutive always aready condition of
maintenence of Dasein within the possibility of violence
which may be inauthentic, authentic, alienated or
ruptured.
That which questions concerning violence must itself be
in proximity to violence as part of being wise, and what
is so wise must, in that proximity, act in responsibility
or bear the effects of violence (trauma/lack sustained by
self or others). Again, for Heidegger, the first word of
such trauma is "guilt". I think this is not the first
word, but the second word. The first word is "violence".
And this word is not properly delivered in Being and
Time. The position of the academic is the continuous
ground of the freedom to engage directly in action
concerning violence in favor of the payoff of sustained
research. In any event, for Heidegger, the effects of
violence in Being and Time amount to little than guilt
and the loss of being with for oneself.
We are seeking a discourse on "the positivities" which
arise out of the positivies. I have said that Heidegger
closes off the positivities and gives us a kind of
derivative version of them via the mechanism of guilt and
via the inhereing but unthematic question of violence.
How to make violence thematic? Any such discourse, for it
to attain to real veracity, must be "contaminated" by
violence in the non-objective relation to the problem of
violence. The good faith which allows the subjectivity of
the relation to violence parallels the good faith by
which the first person report of non-physical experience
(in a certain sense of physical and empirical) is
possible. The founding condition of this relation I will
refer to as the say-do complex. When we hold forth
concerning violence, a question will arise, in various
ways, after a long enough time, as to "what one is doing"
concerning this violence. Why? Because the distention of
the academic research is a distention of the "we must do"
with regards to violence. This distention can be dis-
alienated or positively alienated, or it can be
negatively alienated or develop into forgetfulness and
even rupture. The "health" and power of such a discourse
lies not in the continuous and smooth maintenance of a
positive alienation but in a back and forth movement
which disrupts the very discourse by returning to a non-
distended state.
A discourse concerning violence emanates and develops
from the basis of a kind of directive and project to "do
something" concerning violence. Such a discourse operates
in one of the primary distensions of Being-in-the-world:
the space of thought. The space of thought is bought and
paid for by the freedom to think in the negotiated
investment in thinking according to lived-world
desiderata: knowledge for its own sake, a positive and
definite alienation, infinite regional ontologies,
unlimited theoretics as have been vindicated, for
example, through the success of the creation of the
atomic bomb and other military researches and
accomplishments.
When it comes to the question of violence, in certain
ways the academic distention breaks down. Heidegger gives
us the means by which to identify the structural
alienation of regional ontology from the primary
ontological condition of Dasein, and his writing is
permeated with the call to recognize the limits of such
distention and its possibility for bad alienation. The
work of clarifying this alienation where this pertains to
the discourse, thought and research concerning violence
must in certain ways accomplish the "authentication" that
can occur in something like the movement of Being and
Time, but it must do so in a manner which is at the same
time a departure from that thinking. Being and Time, and
possibly the later thinking of Heidegger, bears
throughout the structures of its ground of the academic
distention. It is necessary to show how the cheif
authenticating movements and conditions displayed in
Being and Time are themselves unable to authenticate the
relation to the other and violence.
I wrote: "His writing is permeated with the call..." The
discourse concerning violence emerges out of the "stuff"
of this call. This stuff might be variously, and probably
must be various characterized as: force, power, love,
will to power, concern, care, responsibility, urgency,
urge, physis, crisis. I will use the word "force" to
signify this complex. In order to get to the question of
violence, this force must be *disalienated* and brought
into a kind of direct engagement in order to open the way
the condition of violence. But this disalienation means
at the same time an alienation from the systematic
disalienation of distended thought, of which even
Fundamental Ontology is an example. I have suggested that
the movement out of the distention might be a movement
into a hybrid condition of thought and action, which I am
calling thoughtaction with the "fateful" or "choiceful"
grasping of the independent thematic-substantive of
nonviolence, though that can be seen as metanym for any
number of hybrid complexs: powerknowledge, satyagraha
(truthforce), praxis (in some senses).
Just as Foucault *enjoys* writing about sexuality, that
is, he himself is imbued with the force of sexuality, and
I think here there is an implicit suggestion that his
writing would be incompetent were he not to enjoy, just
as we expect a writer on music to be musical in the
process, so must a writing on violence stand in the
relation to violence of the nonviolent, whatever that
relation is. We do not want to say that the writer must
themselves be violent. They must, however, stand in the
flux of the moral force, which is at the same time
standing in an robust experience of the positivities
which are done violence to in violence and in the
proximity by which the moral condition of responsibility
of the writer/thinker itself is brough into play.
In the end, it may be a matter of taste whether one
develops a smooth thought-space in which to approach the
question of violence, or instead vascillates between
something more distended and less distended. But really
the limitation on the smoothness pertains to the
limitations on the possibility of sustained thoughtful
discourse in the space of the political. Thus, it is
conditioned, but not "logically bound" to be the case,
that the discourse which is in responsible contact with
the problem of violence will not maintain itself in the
smoothness which characterizes the writings of people
like Heidegger and Foucault. It may as well be a matter
of skill, mood, tendency, factical conditions,
assessments of effectivness, etc. But whether smooth or
no, the space of the discourse concerning violence must
be a space of thoughtaction. If it remains a space of
thought only, it will become negatively alienated,
ruptured. It is not a logical operation that gives us to
this conclusion. We have suspended the search for this
logical operation out of the call to "get the point"
concerning violence, considering the stakes involved.
The main tendency of both Heidegger and Sartre, as
concerns their efforts to develop "fundamental
ontologies" is one which systematically separtes the
"moral plane" (to use a term appearing at the end of
Being and Nothingness) from the ontological. The plane is
essentially smooth and continuous. How is one to get *to*
the moral plane from the ontological plane? And are these
"planes" really so continuous, separable in the first
place?
The various continuities which go to make up the totality
of the geometricity of the plane as such are worth of
consideration. Various totalizations concerning limits,
propriety, speech and silence, theme, belonging, project,
all go into constituting the separation.
---
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.
Tom Blancato
tblancato@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
------------------