Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 11:04:09 -0800 (PST)
From: Michael Rooney <rooney-AT-tiger.cc.oxy.edu>
Subject: Re: God help us, back to TMB




On Mon, 25 Jan 1999, TMB wrote:

> > And what about Deleuze's insistence on the role
> > of violence in thinking?
> 
> Cheap, easy capitalism, Heideggerian-style "return to the Greeks" (in a
> way), while ignoring that the Greek society was founded on slavery.

A bizarre charge, as Deleuze develops the point by
way of criticizing Heidegger.  The flag of capitalism 
makes no sense either, since the violence of thought
is tied to unrecognizablility, and capital rests on
recognition.  And Deleuze's awareness of slavery in
antiquity has no revelance here whatsoever.


> Lazy
> failure to develop things better, amidst so much *production*.
> Capitalization of talent, etc. A failure to think issuing from the very
> closure of thought he cited, but was too close to. 

I am amused by the way that the majority of 
TMB's ponderous posts about "ethics" consist
of associatively linked strings of ad hominem
assertions.


> But, in any event the
> "violence in thinking" thing testifies for the extensiveness I attributed
> to "the ethical", and likewise serves as a founding condition for a
> thinking that has nonviolence as well as desire and "freedom". 

Your capacity with style and sense in English
rivals that of George Bush.  How does the 
"violence in thinking thing" testify to your
turbid notion of the ethical?


> Your
> version of thought, by my standards, is rather like a man who must beat
> his wife every time they make love, and insists that that is the "only way
> to do it, baby!" But look at the black and blue marks over this "thouht".
> Well, you probably can't even see them by now.

What a touching parable.  N.b. the utter
passivity implicit in TMB's lurid scenario.
But then, I imagine that he's never had a 
thought that could fend for itself.


> > I'll take Herakleitos' brevity, wit
> > and polemos over you any day.
> 
> I know. But what if I had some really cool stuff?

I'd pinch myself and go back to bed.


Cordially,

M.