File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9812, message 320


Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 03:54:26 -0500 (EST)
From: TMB <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com>
Subject: RE: Ethics and problematisation


On Wed, 16 Dec 1998, Widder,NE wrote:

> >This is why I think that Nathan's response is somehow locating the
> >definition of the ethics in a dialectical relation at the level
> >reference, or action.
> 
> Well, I don't think I was trying to do that.  I was simply trying to pose
> the problem in terms similar to the way Schurmann poses them in his book on
> Heidegger:  what is involved in praxis if theory no longer means
> establishing the iron-hard rules in thought and action as being measured by
> its conformity to those rules.  The point is that praxis need not fall into
> the standard, idiotic reading given of Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, etc.,
> that "if there are no a priori standards, then every action has equal play,
> and thus these guys are horrid nihilists who would counsel simple violence
> or if they have an ethics then they are involved in some sort of
> performative contradiction."
> 
> On some level, the lack of foundations makes all action strategic.  I
> haven't yet worked out what that means, but it means at least in one sense
> that the rules are not separate from the context in which action occurs.
> Any strategist is doomed to fail if he/she has a set of rules and lacks the
> flexibility to change them with the circumstances.  As for the right/wrong
> distinction, I admit I threw it into the last post with just a parenthetical
> statement asking to separate it from good and evil, but one of the reasons
> for throwing it in is not to say that what is right is good, safe, etc.,
> Right and wrong are both dangerous.  Machiavelli could tell you that.
> Machiavelli for that matter is also quite clear that a prince can do the
> wrong actions and still survive, but he's surviving despite his actions, not
> 
> Part of me wanted to just say "I agree with Tom's post", until he got to the
> Nietzsche reading.  It seemed there that Tom was reading a binarism onto
> Nietzsche.  Why call people enemies?  Ok, we don't have to.  But Nietzsche
> doesn't divide the world into separate categories of friend and enemy.  In
> the friend one also has one's best enemy, Zarathustra says ("On the
> Friend").  We shouldn't love our enemies insofar as this invokes a Christian
> love which hides revenge, and so hides violence.  That doesn't mean we
> should just go around being violent -- Zarathustra, for one, isn't a thug.
> Anyway, to put the matter in simple terms:  Nietzsche says the nobles are
> stupid brutes, he says that going beyond good and evil doesn't really mean
> going beyond good and bad, and in the end, the overman doesn't fit entirely
> into the category of noble, as outlined in the Genealogy, anyway.
> 

Point taken. My reading was poor and kneejerk. I can't read well, nor can
I simply "bow out of discussion". So I read like a starving person plays
basketball, poorly, which makes it easier to dismiss what I have to say
more genrally, not that that is your MO. How and whether the conditions of
my own starvation belong in such a discussion remains, for me, an open
question. Indeed. Your reading, from what I know, looks deft and cautious,
sensible and mature.

Tom



> Nathan
> n.e.widder-AT-lse.ac.uk
> 
> 

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