From: "hwenk" <hwenk-AT-web.de>
To: <deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.driftline.org>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 10:05:34 +0200
Subject: Re: [D-G] deleuze and benjamin on violence



Hello,

Law is made to exclude violence,
that doesn't change from the days of Spinoza.
So a discussion on violence used against the state has
to take this in account.
This is what I missed.
It is not good to play around with the idea of pure violence.


I don't know which book of Spinoza you read, but reason is not bound to
logos in Spinoza but to "adequate ideas". The theme of ideas was the great
achievement of the 17th century philosophy and ended up
in turning philosophy almost completely in a theory of scientific knowledge.
Now in the 17th century Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume and a few other
brought up the philosophical foundation of our modern society.
This included metaphysical, psychological, political and
economical concepts.
So if you want to know something more substantial of the foundations of our
society and man in general, sooner or later you will come to this time and
this philosophers.
In most modern philosophical discourses like Wittgenstein or Heidegger or
even Kant and Hegel
these discussion are supposed to be well known. This is, of course, nowadays
not the case.
Therefore philosophy got a little bit academic and hard to understand.
This can be helped by the reading of the originals, where Spinoza indeed is
very hard to grasp. This is especially because his architecture of
attributes of thinking and expansion is not like attributes or adjectives in
language.
This is also pointed out in Deleuze book on Spinoza.
So it a kind of thinking surpassing ordinary language by
the resources of logic, mathematics and classical philosophy including
scholastic and religion.

Now if you like to think about the real problems of people or anything else,
this is a good source.

greetings Harald Wenk

-----Original Message-----
From: deleuze-guattari-bounces-AT-lists.driftline.org
[mailto:deleuze-guattari-bounces-AT-lists.driftline.org]On Behalf Of NZ
Sent: Dienstag, 28. Marz 2006 18:07
To: deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.driftline.org
Subject: Re: [D-G] deleuze and benjamin on violence


so indeed we are talking of 2 different discussions... I am trying to
stay within the drift of wbenj's essay, which, in my opinion, does not
attempt to explain this type of passionate inter-personal violence
(re: "natural law") that you are discussing (do you think "natural
law" is more interesting to talk about then "positive law"?), and
instead he spends most of the essay developing how violence is
inherent to law/logos (I am at least trying to extend his drift into
logos specifically), as he moves forward so as to talk about
mythic-law-creation.

In terms of Spinoza's ethics-of-passions, the violence that I see,
comes from the mere act of defining the internal space of man in the
manner inwhich Spinoza has done. This kind of law-making violence
(so-called ethics) which spinoza uses to attack the nebulous nature of
human identity, really culminates in freudian psychology, their aim to
pin the subject down, code it, and control(destroy) it, as a modern
project of capitalism (re: anti-oedius). The "self-defence," that you
speak up is a secondary step (in terms of the freudian-type theories
of emotional energy constants internally) - wherein the subject can
only resort to violence... against violence. [Please dont think that I
am eagar to start punching and shooting people for fun, that is not
what I would like to spend my time defending myself against as there
is much to get into here, as you acknowledge....]
So,  It is an acknowledged second step, which is why it is protected
by "positive law" (re: benj.'s "c.p.violence") Wbenj. has some
interesting (too brief) passages that describe these complicated steps
and how they work together and how they are also at odds... like the
part where he talks about "techniques" of arbitration and confrence.
Seems to me that "technique" is very important in regards to violence
control.
One of the key aspects of Spinoza, in my opinion, is the application
of coded action, prescripted action. It becomes like witchcraft where
the blessed reader/user can de-fer a "true" conscious-intelligence,
and instead default to a one-dimensional code. For Spinoza, the truth
understanding principle is limited to logos-centered code... it is no
long language dialog, as Spinoza cannot come to agreement with the
world around him and must spend is time violently defending himself...
and since his work was made illegeal by various religious instituions
of the time, this violence now gets directed at the reader of
modernity and thereby "incorporated" into the cannon of soveriegnty.
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