Date: Sun, 11 Aug 1996 08:12:19 -0400 (EDT) From: Tom Blancato <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com> Subject: Re: polemos, violence, virility (fwd) Yes, I should have made myself clear here: on the one hand, I don't mean to "point a finger" at "Dasein", or at specific philosophers. *On the other hand*...there are some seemingly important logics involved in placing a burden of responsibility on Dasein and specific thinkers, logics which I have not yet found a way to articulate. I think it's not an all or nothing thing, a *yes* or a *no*, but a matter of degree. Could it be that *standing* as such does not admit of degrees? Certainly, Dasein can do violence to itself, just as Dasein can call itself, even if the issuance of this call is furthest from Dasein. And the history of violence is a history of Dasein's violence to itself. But those aren't the the kind of logic I'm thinking of here. This thinking, here, will have to be incomplete for the time being. I'm thinking, rather, of what happens when we "blame" Plato, for example, to a certain extent. Now, straight off, please recall that for me this question, and it is a question, presumes utterly that it is a matter of degree, a question of criteria, thresholds, limits. The center stage must be displaced for this question. Displaced, but not removed. There is a totality involved in the conception of the center stage, and it is of the stage of the center (stage) to frame the critique of the center stage in totalities: either Dasein is "center stage" or off the center stage altogether. (I.e., naive or minimally non-naive composure, etc.) Greatness and heroism, or shepherding... Nor will the middle ground suffice here; to displace opens the opening which displays the *mis en scene*, which Dasein occupies *variously*. The opening of the structural placement reveals, even if just for a moment, the *poetics of place*, provided that one has eyes to see this. Dasein's responsibility permeates stage, audience, directorial aspects, dramaturgy, curtains (staying with a theater metaphor here) not as specific *roles*, but as permeations *in each role*. This seems fitting with what I take to be the firm insights of Heidegger regarding hermeneutic conditions, the constitution of the "there", Dasein as thrown-projection, etc. The opening of the question of violence (in nonviolence) is the disclosing not of any central event, but the "marbleized", so to speak, veins throughout actor, stage, audience, choreographer, text, etc. Veins of intention. As this opening, and as the *awakening* to the gravity of violence, it is rather like a color already present in a spectrum which, owing to some shift in basic vision now becomes available to Dasein wherever there is light, in whatever is lighted. This "flooded" structure of the there, Dasein as its disclosedness, is part of what Heidegger is at such pains to make clear. Not that the question of violence is, as it were, the royal road to the clearing. (Or is it?) Now, when we take this view, historically vis a vis the history of Being, what happens? There is a sense of "shift", and so many motifs of gradual movement, world movement, world withdrawl, etc., which mark the shifts in the history of Being, as Heidegger sees it. This is posed against the notion of Dasein's doing violence to itself, or of pointing a finger at Plato. The tendency to intentionalize even mundane historical developments and world conditions is something to be guarded against, I think. But if we recognize the problem of violence as such, the hiding of violence, the "failure" to *take up* nonviolence, the failure to hear what has called most loudly throughout history for thinking, which must certainly be violence, part of the self-emburdening-enlightening disalienation of nonviolence is the *recognition that nonviolence, and violence-as-an-issue has always already been there*. Just as Heidegger's rethinking recuperation of Being clarifies at the same time the operations of the thinking of Being in Plato, Aquinas, Nietzsche and Kant, so too does nonviolence *recognize* how it stands with violence in such thinkers and in epochs or epistemes. Heidegger avoids casting the moral gaze because his own, as alienated from its nonviolence, remains violent. The de-moralization of the moral, a la Nietzsche, is not the same as the disalienation of nonviolence, which I view as a certain recuperation of primordial genius which each Dasein is/has. The poles of thrown-projection parallel this aspect of *physis* in this way, I speculate: thrownness corresponds to primordial genius, and projection corresponds to *standing in the gravity of the possibility of violence in nonviolence*. In any event, the transformation of the present transforms history. Is what is recognized in the "lighting of nonviolence", if it can be called that, then a culpibility permeating such thinkers? (I am forestalling, just for a moment, for the sake of this questioning the important consequences for "finger-pointing" and what that signifies here, for culpability, responsibility, guilt, etc.) But what is disclosed and retro-disalienated is not a *specific* culpability, but the culpability and responsibility of Being, Being's charge, the always-there charge *of the there*, just as "Dasein is always guilty" (in the alienated formulation). Primordially and in the first instance, Dasein is always *responsible*. In *every* "is", *there is responsibility*, and this *responsibility is always in part the possibility of violence and Dasein's standing in nonviolence, as nonviolence*. Whether Dasein is *guilty*, historically, is another matter. Guilt presupposes *punishment*, intrinsically, I think. Responsibility does not. Nonviolence makes this distinction. Heidegger does not. Heidegger is responsible for "guilt". Does this thinking seek to save Plato (et al), and Dasein, from guilt? >From the scene of accuasation? Or the thinking of Michael and Paul here? That is not quite what is at work here. Nor is it, am I, saying that Heidegger is guilty of guilt, nor that Plato, Kant and Nietzsche are guilty of guiltlessness, though to a certain extent, that is clearly part of what Heidegger is doing. Or, if he is not doing that, if it is not so clear, he is definitely recuperating and circling through these thinkers in search of lost guilt. But what is at work in this thinking is different >from that. In Heidegger and in Paul and Michael's reading, the pointed identification is tempered and recast, however, not as "guilt" but as a neutral "movement" of placement and *errance*. (We can bear in mind the softening of "sin" as "error" as this occurs in some religious discourses.) But what is at work here is not even a softening, and is not a de-intentionalizing/de-responsibilizing. It is a "responsibilizing" in a certain way. To clarify the crucial moment in this juncture: the movement of "how it is, and has been" with regards to the history of Being from casting Dasein as being in the center to the displacement in favor of a Being whose epochs are beyond the arrogance of narcissistic or self-aggrandized Dasein, *or* for reactive, blaming Dasein, even a kind of "paranoid" Dasein, is one which de-responsibilizes Dasein, individually and in various collectivities, *too much*. (I'm not really hitting this off fully, only partly.) My suspicion here is that this shift from "sin to errance", and especially, from capability to the "incapability" of a kind of acqueisence to Being, its extremism and structuralism, the striking shift of emphasis, from center stage to right out of the theater, is a function of the *violence* which is still unrecognized. It is never a total violence, yet it is never totally not a violence, either. Here, probability probably wrests itself, does not "call" itself, but rather en-gend-ers, generates itself in *primordial genius* which Dasein in every case is, in a certain physis and emergence into standing: the standing in nonviolence. Incompletely, Tom B. On Thu, 8 Aug 1996, Paul Murphy wrote: > The weather here is positively tropical, so forgive me if this is muddled. > > Michael Eldred writes: > > >I am not implying beyng as violence is on centre stage, but that to interpret > >the oblivion to beyng as a violence done to beyng by human being would make > >humans the agents/subjects of the oblivion and in this sense put them or leave > >them 'on centre stage'. Dasein as an event in the history of beyng whereby the > >essencing of truth turns, thus using humans in an event-ful way, precludes a > >centre-staging of human beings. > > I think this is exactly right. Heidegger himself came to have misgivings > about the term Seinsvergessenheit (I believe these are expressed in the > Vier Seminare), precisely because it implies some activity -- some violence > -- on the part of human being, making oblivion to being something for which > man is responsible. Such a claim, applied to the recollection of the > history of being, might imply that Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, > Descartes, etc. etc. got it 'wrong', make a mistake, messed up somewhere, > which is not Heidegger's point. > > For this reason Heidegger adopted different terms: withdrawal, default, > staying-away [Ausbleiben]. This way of thinking is explored in some detail > in the essay from the end of the _Nietzsche_ volumes, "Nihilism as > Determined by the History of Being". (Mr. Blancato: if you haven't read > this essay, I recommend it highly. Indeed, besides _Intro. to Metaphysics_, > the lecture and essays on nihilism in the Nietzsche book are an exemplary > source for beginning to pose the question of violence). > > Here Da-sein is described as the abode of being's default: "Being bestows > [begabt] itself by betaking [begibt] itself into its unconcealment, and > only in this way is It Being -- along with the locale of its advent as the > abode of its default [mit der Ortschaft seiner Ankunft als der Unterkunft > seines Ausbleibens]. This 'where' as the 'there' of the shelter belongs to > Being itself, 'is' Being itself and is therefore called Da-sein". > > Being, as unconcealment, withdraws in the very unconcealment of entities, > thereby sending Dasein historically. Or as Heraclitus says, "physis > kryptesthai philei": physis loves to hide. Heraclitus attributes so > self-inflicted violence to this sheltering, this encryptment, and neither > does Heidegger. > > Cheers, > Paul N. Murphy > University of Toronto > > > > > --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- > _____________________________________________________________________ "I'll take my coffee without sugar produced in slave labor camps, third world plantations and by prison chain gangs, thank you." _____________________________________________________________________ --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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