Date: Tue, 6 Aug 96 19:20 +0100
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (M.Eldred_artefact)
Subject: RE: Verhaltenheit/violence/Seinsdenken


Cologne, 6 August 1996

There has obviously been a mistunderstanding between me and Tom 
Blancato regarding Verhaltenheit and its translation as either "composure" or 
"restrainedness/reservedness". 

In my last post I retracted the translation as "composure", to which Tom had 
responded, and instead offered some thoughts on "reservedness" related 
specifically to the passage in the Beitraegen which I had originally cited. 

It's definitely true that I have not responded to all you have said, Tom. I have 
chosen passages to which I have something to say, and I do not grasp the compass 
of your motivation. But no matter, for you are Tom Blancato, and I am Michael 
Eldred. 

Not everything I have said has been specifically directed at you, e.g. the 
sequences with "the charge of morality", and I am not simply accusing you of 
stage-grabbing. I think on the contrary that I have let myself in for 
considering your central concerns to some appreciable extent. 

I have pointed out where I regard that much more detailed connections 
have to worked out between the question of violence and essential aspects of the 
thinking of beyng, to wit: aletheia, the understanding of being as standing 
presence, the steps back, among other aspects. Your positing of a question of 
violence is in a way your own creative act with its own 'violence', but this is 
fair enough. The violence has to be carried through. 

I doubt very much whether the oblivion to being can be interpreted as a violence 
done to beyng, for this puts or leaves human beings on centre stage once again. 
Is there an inherent anthopocentrism in the question of violence as you have 
posed it? The oblivion to beyng is the event of beyng's own epoche 
(reservedness, its holding-itself-back). I do not think this can be understood 
as beyng doing violence to itself. Is Heraclitean polemos the violence of being 
itself which uses beings and human beings to e-rect a world in its standingness 
in the open space of unconcealment? 

The style of Verhaltenheit/reservedness/restrainedness cannot be read 
prescriptively, that is, unless one wants to do violence to the aethos of 
phenomenological thinking. I read it rather as a presentiment of the mood of the 
transition to the other beginning. The advent of the transition is marked by the 
event 'Heidegger' in the twenties. Since then we (few) are living in the epoch 
of the advent of the thinking of beyng. 

So I heartily disagree that there is or has been a thinking of being itself 
apart from the event Heidegger, just as little a there has been a thinking of 
the being of beings apart from the event 'Plato/Aristotle', who were used by the 
advent of the being of beings to bring it to thought-ful language. 

Heidegger has certainly focussed on the 'violence' of technology with its 
origins in the opening of the being of beings to techne. But technology here has 
to be understood in a very broad sense as all grabbing of beings under the 
guidance of a knowing in-sight. His explication of the essencing of technology 
as the set-up (or enframement) neglects the capitalist garb of this grasp on 
beings. And there has been scant attention paid in Heidegger to the other 
person, bodiliness, intimacy (within which I would situate your reference to 
sexuality). These are desiderata that have moved and continue to move my own 
thinking. 

The ambiguity in the Ghandhi quote is interesting, don't you think? 

Cheers and regards,

Michael
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