Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 17:17:52 +0000 (GMT)
From: John Appleby <pyrew-AT-csv.warwick.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: God help us, back to TMB


On Tue, 26 Jan 1999, TMB wrote:

> be something you care about, it may be thought, you may thing I am a
> threat to that, for others

No, not really. As you said yourself nobody is forced to listen, I just
wanted to raise the question of whether nonviolenec was perceived by you
as some form of imperative in which case, as you point out

> This is all degraded 

> But this does not mean that we therefore simply are no longcer concerned
> about things getting hurt

But can we commit acts of violence to prevent greater acts of violence and
still be ethical in your terms? For example, in _Plague of Fantasies_
Zizek claims that their are certain types of speech which should not be
allowed ('the Holocaust never happened', etc.). This is certainly a
violent act, but is it an ethical one? 

> I'm saying, simply, that ethics is concerned with violence, and where
> there is violence, there is also, to some degree, however minute,
> nonviolence, a negation of violence, an orientation toward its prevention,
> amelioration, etc.

This idea that things contain their own negation is very anti-D&G. How do
you square it with your claims that their stuff is useful on this front? 

Before anybody out there starts howling about how I'm some sort of
academic fascist trying to promote a 'correct' reading of D&G (hello
elf-boy), this is a genuine question and not an attempt to get at anybody.

As to your thing about misreading Spinoza, that was not what I meant.
Unfortunately I left a 'than' out of the sentence. I simply meant that it
had more to do with Levinas than Sp.

Regards

John

ps any chance that you could bung a few paragraphs in your posts; they're
bloody difficult to read.