Date: Sun, 18 Aug 1996 11:58:41 -0400 (EDT) From: Tom Blancato <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com> Subject: Re: Q of V Some thoughts regarding death, guilt and other matters, within the horizon of the question of violence and prompted by a recent post from Paul Murphy. The movements of *laying bare* (note the resonance with the "skeletal") in Division 2, section 3 of SZ are exemplary of a certain operation that takes place frequently, to say the least, throughout Being and Time. The operation here can be characterized as a certain polemos which installs itself, setting up an opposition between the everyday/common sense, etc., and the authentic, ontologically clarified understanding, etc. The two face-off like charicatures in a political cartoon. It appears to me that there are several problems with this. The *actual* violence (but this term is in question) enacted by Heidegger's procedure does not seem to be the violence to the everyday *in its mistakenness*, but in what is dismissed and passed off as "mere" and "everyday", which I'll refer in the shorthand (and ironic) "mid-zone" and Dasein's multiple-meaninful ownmosts. The "mid-zone" is a zone between the "height" of Death and the "low" of Dasein's everydayness. This "zone" is also what I take to be *the multiplicity of that which is ownmost for Dasein, which has "existential" or "insistential" purchase for Dasein, etc.* The kind of foreclosure -- and foreclosure is a crucial issue for the Q of V, and an unopened (forclosed?) theme in SZ -- I am pointing to here is typical of the scene of violence, but only a rigorous phenomenological investigation could show this. This, in turn, takes us immediately to the ground of the self-wresting of nonviolence: this condition of the hiding of that which can show the violence of the hiding, see the violence of seeing, is a species of *metaviolence*. In terms of phenomenology, this might be regarded as necessarily involving a phenomenology of phenomenology, a seeing of seeing. (I should note that any phenomenology is already meta-phenomenological, but may not, in some first instance, understand itself as such. Note that the possibility of metaphenomenology is pointed to in Husserl without understanding that his own development of phenomenology is *already* metaphenomenological.) This violence is not the violence Heidegger himself notes. And along the way, we have to reaffirm that the mere mention of violence or the *deployment* of its theme (which is not its *thematization*) in adjudicated violence or even its thematic development and interpretation in an explicit thematic-substantive thinking-ethos of *nonviolence* does not guarantee an absence of violence nor an absence of failing, error, biolence, "structural violence", foreclosure, etc. The same goes for this writing, as usual. Set up in SZ is a distinction between the everyday -- a certain proximal availability to Dasein which has the characteristics of arbitrariness, "lowness" and a being-leveled-over of import, value, worth, ontological purchase, a mereness and chaotic nature, a lostness, etc. -- and the authentic care of Dasein as guilty-indebted being-towards-death in, through, or over and above the factical Situation. But this characterization is patently, or demonstrably and phenomenally, false. What is available even to (supposedly or actually) unreflective Dasein is not proximally and for the most part mere chaos, nor "physical things", though no doubt many a philosopher has had the tendency to take things this way. (More below.) While this polemical gesture accomplishes itself somewhat freely in certain stages of Heidegger's progression, it must be noted that it does not occur as freely in other stages. For example, when anticipatorily resolute Dasein understands itself according to its own Death, the factical Situation gives Dasein *potentialities for Being*, which must be assumed here to arise out of the "everyday" in a somewhat wholistic manner and which include that which takes place in the "mid-zone". But this wholism, which stands in contrast to the polemos/division in question, only aggravates the problem. To be very clear here, I am suggesting that: 1. Death is simply one item in the mid-zone. Recognizing this threatens a certain Dasein with a loss of its ownmost among the *multiplicity of that which is ownmost for Dasein*. 2. In particular, it threatens *thoughtless Dasein* and *non-non-violent* Dasein, since it is *thought* and *nonviolence* which specifically handle the *problem of multiplicity* and *irreducibility of essential meaningfulness*. 3. Death is not the "highest" thing for Dasein: there is no particular "highest" for Dasein, or the heights of Dasein are many and incommensurable/incomparable via any simple schema such as "low-high". 4. Death's being commensurate with other existentialia is part of what enables its being-forgotten. 5. Death is exploited in Heidegger's progression as a master organizing principle, not (only) by virtue of its essential "function", but by virtue of the *desirability* -- as part of a *desire* which is alienated from the being awakened to the gravity of violence, from *thought* -- of the operation of *any master principle* in the face of multiciplicity and irreducible meaningfulness. 6. The *other beings*/existentialia in the meaning-multiplicity of that which is ownmost for Dasein have an *interactive and developing effect* for Death in Dasein, and vice versa. That Dasein breathes, lives, loves, eats, sleeps and pays taxes (well, maybe not paying taxes), etc. is also true and undeniably Dasein's ownmost which can not be done for Dasein by another individual Dasein. Such beings, doings, feelings, activities, engagements, relationships, modes of care and world disclosure, etc., are *all beings*. Yet, death is also true for Dasein, and is not a being in the way that other *beings* a r e. But the same in fact goes for the *other* beings in which Dasein in-sists. Does Heidegger find in death a mode of certainty which is *commensurate* with a conception and style of truth and repertoire or workshop of thinking to which he himself holds, a certain "logical rigor"? The simplistic structures of Being-with-others for authenticated Dasein (solicitude, finding one's hero, etc) mentioned by Heidegger seem to suggest this. Does he in fact employ as central for Dasein in its existentiel understanding precisely the crudest aspect of Being: the "and not rather nothing" that accompanies every sense of Being? Doesn't the exploitation of the negational aspect of Being, in mining Dasein for the gold of death-truth in Dasein constitute a dismissal of any *content* of the "is" and the unfolding of its multiple senses, in favor of that which can be *grasped ahold of* *across* Being: the sheer negation? That is to say, is Dasein, having clarified its understanding of Being to restrict itself precisely from developing that understanding fully, and is therefore the clarification of the understanding actually in primary service to being-towards-death? Is the *intentional element* of Dasein as a *laying ahold* able precisely to lay ahold of death while "remaining open" to the content of the current Situation, precisely in the manner of leaving aside *as unthematized in Heidegger's progression* all of the *dealings* which, unlike the hammering, grasping hands of the carpenter's workshop, require multiplicities of finnesse, projectional dealing, growing, learning, struggling, slow disclosure, ambiguity, ambivalence, slow courage, soft resoluteness, love, sensuality, language, etc., that is the *dissolution of the "hand", the manipulation, the manceps-mancipium into the multiplicity of irreducible meaning*? Does death *eclipse* in a stellar fashion a "fuzzy realm" that is too troublesome to deal with? Is it false to say that love, friendship, family, society are as "ownmost" as Death is for Dasein? Is there a good reason for priveliging the Fact of Death *over and above* these other ownmosts? Or does their being put at a secondary level of priority not, on the contrary, constitute a *violence to death* as well as to these other things? The arising of *nonviolence*, I hypothesize, takes place precisely on the basis of the opening of this "multiplicitous-meaningful ground" in a vigilance against its being foreclosed, as opposed to the clarified and death-dominated ground in SZ. There are numerous "ontical" circumstances, which are in fact permeated with their own *ontological* import, meaning and self-maintaining *understanding*, albeit in a manner less or otherwise developed than that of Heidegger, which can be cited as examples of how death can operate in such a stellar, eclipsing fashion. In olympian, heroic fashion, Heidegger "goes for the gold". The "gold", *a* shining truth, is there, I'm not denying this, but it is not the only gold. I am suggesting that the (strip) mining for this gold, as it occurs in Heidegger, is not without (potentially extreme) "environmental" consequences, in numerous ways. Just as the first investigations of SZ must be rethought according to the horizon of *time*, the existential Analytic, or at least *Heidegger's* existential Analytic must be rethought according to nonviolence. One consequence of the "olympian" in SZ is an inadequacy as regards violence, or the question of violence. But this inadequacy is not a mere "environmental" *byproduct*, or *issue*, when the "mid-zone" is opened up. In truth, in the opening of the "mid-zone", which is not a mid-zone at all (it is not commensurable with a low-medium-high schema, let alone a low-high schema), the possibility and ontological *function* of *nonviolence* becomes accessible in its *primordiality*, even if in its primordiality it is *also* an historically determined emergence. Nonviolence "is", in part, *this very opening against* the foreclosures of violence, and is a *constant* *mode of concern* for Dasein, even if Dasein denies it. The *emergence* of nonviolence, which is *not a determinate Being* but a condition of possibility and *manner* or *style* of being, "is" in precisely the kind of "dialogue" and series of contestations taking place quite *minimally* in the question of violence or the preparations for it, its self-wrestings, its physis of "primordial genius" (projection) and historical indebtedness (thrownness) and emergence into self-standing as standing-in-nonviolence. What is at work in setting the stage of this polemos between an everyday which is a mere idling chaos and the arbitrariness of what is closest to hand, and the purity of death? Why are the *most proximal things available* to Dasein not *others*? Why are *others* (as has been explored, of course by Levinas and others) not the primary *things* that Dasein encounters? In point of fact, in most cases, they are: one's friends, parents, lover(s), aquaintances, teachers, etc. And why do not "mere" *things*, objects in the world, pieces of chalk, motorcycles, etc., dinner tables devoid of diners, lead more or less immediately to others? I'm sorry, but this appears to be something of a ruse or a foreclosure whose strategy is, to say the very least, highly questionable, even if philosophy may not simply "admit" such a presupposition. Even though *mitsein* is a primordial condition of Dasein and Dasein i s its mitsein always already, it appears that the structural/ontological consequences of this condition are not adequately developed from the stanpoint of the most fundamental and *predeveloped* stages of the question of Being. One example of this inadequacy is in this example of the omission of the "mid-zone" and the *passing over* the mitsein via the *mere mention*. If Heidegger's progression depends *utterly* on a certaion phenomenal convincing, then we must stand firm at the scene of the polemos in question and *refuse to proceed* -- a kind of civil disobedience? -- when that which is shown is seen to be truncated and phenomenally incorrect. We must, as does Heidegger and in the spirit of phenomenology, *deconstruct* those "takings of Dasein" which are inaccurate. One such inaccuracy is the discrepency between the portrayal of that with which Dasein concerns itself as being the "lowly realm" of mere things in arbitrayr chaos or sheer untility and the recognition of Dasein as always already being with otehrs. While Heidegger is *not* taking Dasein as a thing *present at hand*, he is taking Dasein as a confluence of self-gathered *existentialia* whose constituent are not adequately displayed and thought through in terms of their ontological function. He is covering over this inadequacy, perhaps simply in the sway of semblances and errance, in the polemos between the Cartesian (et al) misconceptions and some initial attempts to redefine Dasein. (This polemos takes place as well in Merleau-Ponty, for example.) This polemos, which even extols and *defines essentially* polemos, does not take *polemos* into question and does not raise the question of violence, a question which belongs *even more essentially* in such a project as Heidegger's than it belongs in more mundane thinking and activity. Indeed, its importance rises exponentially, just as the stakes of violence on the order of the "ontological" rise exponentially as well. But we may also say that Heidegger is himself at issue with a certain *violence* to the phenomena, and to Dasein, as this occurs both inside and outside of philosophy. My contention here is that philosophy has tended to proceed in the manner of an identification of violence, and errance, in a manner that has not been able to clarify its own essential grounding *in nonviolence*, and thus has remained circling about itself in a certain "lostness". Nonviolence is taken up repeatedly, and out of a certain necessity, without it dawning on people to finally say, "let us also be vigilant about violence as such, in an independent way." This of course does not guarantee an absence of violence, but it effects significant changes. Heidegger is fully in keeping with *this* unreflective (vis a vis nononviolnece) sense of "philosophy", and I think that much of the well-known post-philosophical thought, including that of Heidegger, arises out of a condition of *alienated or not yet authenticated nonviolence*. As I've suggested, to say that the stellar eclipsing or "death-star" phenomenon (even with shades of _Star Wars_ and its popular version of primordial polemos and the Oedipal) of SZ operates in that text as a "master organizing principle" is not to say that Dasein doesn't die, nor that a certain "lighting of Death" is not crucial for disalienation/authentication for Dasein. I think that it is *easier* to pursue the thinking of Being and Time without including or by glossing over the elements of the "mid-zone" of that which is neither the mere chaotic/sheer objectivity nor death "in the highest" -- and yet, death-infused as dying -- despite the fact of their phenomenal Facticity. The *crisis of violence* is the *very multiplicity and irreducible meaninfulness of crises*, in part. Also, when multiplicity is released, and death is released from the lower-higher schema, it is better able to take its "rightful"/proper place as constitutive for Daseins' multiple beings, being-multiple, in the *irreducibility* of these items of the multiplicity. (It may be noted that this writing is a kind of polemic. Indeed, it is a kind of *anti-polemic* founded on *minimally non-naive or non-totalitarian nonviolence* as the struggle with and contestation precisely of/with *polemos*. And as I've repeatedly noted, it is a first cause for nonviolent thoughtaction for non-totalitarian nonviolence to be steadfastly vigilant against the abuse of the admission of *polemos* and even adjudicated violence.) In working to grasp Dasein's essence in pursuit of the question of Being, the thinking of SZ works to *getting its hands on it*, to get it under hand, putting the mid-zone ready-to-hand, even if this appears to be a somewhat underhanded, albeit handy, way of (man)handling the question. But this ease is one of the *very characteristics* of the scene of violence: violence organizes worlds cheaply and in privative and foreclosing ways. (But, we are asked, why not be violent?) The forgetting of violence in Heidegger is at the same time that which enables the violence of the Heideggerian (and any such) progression. It *is* the violence of the Heideggerian progression to reduce, restrict, cover over, misportray, foreclose, take as illegitimate or lowly *anything but Being/Death* and to put the "mere content" of the Being of Dasein in its current Situation in a pure subservience to Death. It is not enough that nonviolence be tacked on here and there as a merely "desirable" state of affairs that virile Dasein tosses in simply when possible or convenient while the virile man of thought sheds a tear when things "must" get violent. In the Interpretation of Dasein, the very structures and movements of the Analytic themselves have a special, reflective relation to that which is explored and thematized/developed. The entry of pre-thematic ontology into something more "properly" ontological is a slow, careful, utterly reflective process of rethinking, appropriation, questioning, reintroduction, etc. Just as the *sense* of given phrases and preontological data preliminary for the progression must be held in place and questioned, so too must the sense of "violence" be introduced in an independent, thematic way into the substance of ontological progression. And so, too, must the *condition* of nonviolence be maitained in an authentic standing immanent in questioning and thinking. In taking note of this problem, it is especially important to see how the *active intelligence* of Dasein is "moved up" to Death and placed solely in the question of Being in its finitude, to the detriment of the *other existentialia* and multiple-meaninful onwmosts constitutive for Dasein's being-in-the-world. In *grasping* Death in anticipatory resoluteness, and in the sway of the stellar grip of Death whose drama Heidegger painstakingly lays out, the dismissed elements remain unthematized and are to be accessible *only by openness*. Dasein is reduced to a receptivity regarding the current Situation and its potentialities for Being, or is "left on its own" to grasp, seize, deal with, develop, act on, understand, etc., these other matters, which are reduced to a kind of "mere content" of the structure of Dasein in its being-towards-death wherein its authentic thoughtfulness is to main-tain itself, perhaps in the tacit hope that their not being introduced to Thought is to preserve their authenticity. To be sure, were they introduced, the specific "contents" of the current factical Situation would not be appropriate for the level of investigation undertaken in SZ, but these things themselves are *shot through with ontological import and constitutive structures fully appropriate for philosophy, only one of which is Being-Death/Dying*. These "other things", such as love, (non)violence, the Other, etc., should *prima facie* be held suspect of the *very same kinds of commonsense misinterpretations that Heidegger shows take place in the thinking of Death and Time*. Also, Death *can* be "in service" to, understood by, and under the care of other aspects of Dasein as can violence, and of course, violent death or rupture, lesion and tearing. Perhaps it is time that thinkers learn to think more than one thought. If thinking is released into the multiplicites of Dasein's multiple ownmosts, the hammering (polemical) *handling* of the thinking of Death in SZ, thought's hand in the matter reduced to a sheer, singular significational mode or a truncated range of possible activities -- rather like an opening of only *carpentry* in Heideggers "philosophical shop*, while leaving aside things such as shoe-making, ballet, gardening, massage -- is dis-solved out of its *resolve* into the gesturing and genuinely *linguistic*, sentential, meaningful, poetic hand-writing which is subservient to understanding and entered irreducibly into the multiple play of beings *in language, dialogue and world*. Anticipatory resolve is not lost in minimally nonnaive nonviolence; only a "polemical" or violent interpretation would attempt the sheer reversal of a truncation in the manner of *elimination*. Nonviolence eschews stylistically unitary, digital, telegraphic, truncated, reductive manners of signification, but only if it can courageously stand in the ground of free speech/writing and authentic discourse. And this has profound consequences for the the way Death permeates Dasein's Being and for reticence of the understanding of Death. Likewise, the *reticence* of guilt -- thought not guilt/responsibility itself -- which I won't see simply in terms of indebtedness, following Heidegger's own (apparent) clarification of Guilt, is *also* that which can become phenomenally manifest and operational precisely when the "mid-zone" is silenced *as the low-zone of idle chatter* or pleading. From mere chatter to sheer silence/reticence. But the reticence of the relentlessly exacting and demanding conscience appears to me also to be a certain logic/condition of silence as punitive, or, as Heidegger puts it, "critical". The free reign for this exaction is made clear by the founding polemos which eliminates the midzone from thought and puts it in the mode of sheer receptivity. But neither will I separate gulit from *punishment*. Isn't punishment precisely *critique in the mode of hammering*? Dasein's pants pulled down in order that death can "slap its bottom" which is in turn to turn red authentically, which is of course all Dasein asks, consciencewise? Doesn't critique derive radically from "crisis"? If there is crisis and critique as a certain putting-to-crisis, should not or must not this "critique" be maintained in *that which is best able to handle crisis and the multiplicity of crises as very crisis of crisis itself*? Again, the "mid-zone" would have to truly *remain open* *as thought and thematized* and would have to be maintained by that which is *best equipped to handle it*: thought and nonviolence and, independently, *the full body of Dasein*, inclusive of speech/writing (which is *already founded on silence, in part*) and dialogue -- it's legs, so to speak -- as irreducible meaning refusing the bare bottom of signification, the crude sign grounds, the freezing of the speech and language which rather must remain open and flexible. The pants are left up and freedom of movement is maintained. Silence is not the best mode of letting-be; it's the worst mode, the most privative, the least able to disclose the world in the most faituful way. Silence is not the only mode of Being towards Death and hearing the call of conscience. It is rather a polemical, violent and truncated mode. The *withholding* that takes place in silence as Heidegger develops this sense appears to me to be something of an "interrogational tactic" which, by the same gesture by which the "mid-zone" is shoved aside *as lowly mereness*, shoves aside not only the irrelevant, but the entire range of relevance which can presence in the *ground of speech/writing* which Heidegger himself cites as *central to worlding*, but which, conscience-wise, is to be taken as "mere pleading" or, perhaps, "looking for a better deal". But what is at issue here, then, is in particular the freedom, in speech, to be self-critical, as opposed to the irresponsible speech which is assumed (by Heidegger, I suspect) to predominate as that through which Dasein can only be "for itself" and can "think against itself" (Nietzsche) only rarely, and must be cornered and have guilt *exacted* or *extracted* from it, like pulling teeth. Nonviolent Dasein does not have to be cornered and in Fact resists such cornering *fundamentally* and *ontologically*. This implies that I, the writer of this text, should *say*, somewhere along the line of this thinking, *I am guilty, I am responsible*. It is no surprise (to me) that for Gandhi, nonviolence was intrinsically related to the capability of the self-proclamation of failings. But, in the hermeneutic condition of meta-nonviolence requisite for thoughtful nonviolence, *just as questioning of questioning is essential for thoughtful questioning for Heidegger*, it is *only nonviolence itself which can secure the ground for such admission*. I should note that the silence in question is *also* the silence accompanying the *form of the treatise*, in which the writer tells the reader what he or she thinks, where there is any semblance of dialogue. I'll leave this undeveloped here. The length of this post is of a piece with its anti-polemos: I am guilty of writing something too long, but I do so under duress. That Dasein can always be guilty and *is constantly guilty* in authentic Dasein just as much and insofar as it is always dying leaves open the question: how far can or should such a guilt-death elision be brought to obtain, *if its system can be guaranteed, a priori, to disclose (hermetic) truth*? How much of a conscience does Dasein want, and in what manner is this conscience to develop and maintain itself? And in a ground of silence or of speech/writing? How and when are we to tell, having banished all speech and the "mid-zone" entirely, de facto and de jure, when guilt is being exacted *as authentic* and when it is being *extracted* as truth is extracted from a political prisoner, wherein only the answer which is anticipated is accepted, while the self-admittedly and adjudicated "'violent'" hand (of philosophy, for example) stands ready to "slap" any speech which doesn't fit the polemos or stands ready to head off all speech by pre-setting the stage as one of the polemos between the "mere" and the "highest"? Thus, the regime of Heideggerian-style conscience, perhaps having little or no conscience about style, manner, "howness" (this lst owing to a certain capitalism) and nonviolence, appears to be upheld not by what is true in an ethos founded on thought and nonviolence, since its (non)violence is not given to thought and its thought is not given to (non)violence, but rather by the very *constitution* of truth for Factical Dasein, and by the strongmen and strongwomen who have the stomach for so severe, continuous and apparently corrupt a scene of polemos and gestures of dismissal. (I testify that I have been such a strongman in reading and Understanding Heidegger at times, and I have strongly refused a straight-forward maintenance in such an Understanding at other times, as well.) This is of a piece with Heidegger's own progression, which is of course of his time, of his and preceding epochs, of the treatise and of formalism/structuralism, the inauthentic and incorporated dialogue which *speaks for the reader*, etc. For *if the grounds of Heidegger's movement regarding Death and Guilt are held in place, a truth will light* because Dasein, as being-in-the-truth, can not deprive itself of truth altogether, at least *not without rupture*. It does not take much thinking to see where such a condition of the deprivation of truth, which, to be clear, is at stake in this questioning of Heidegger and the thinking of _SZ_, would lead. This is precisely one of the prime conditions of (potential) violence arising out of the progression of -- not "The", but *Heidegger's* -- Existential Analytic. It would remain to be asked where, how and why such deprivation of truth in a pure or total sense can occur; to what extent it would be in the form of *rupture*; where, whether and to what extent such a rupture would also be a violence; and what forms such violence would take. Final note: It is of the nature of nonviolence to open alternativity, and is the failing of polemos-based progress and progressivisms to fail to develop, even to foreclose, alternatives. The alternatives which would develop out of the antipolemos of the thinking in this writing would involve numerous changes to how a "Heideggerian" thinking would proceed. While I can't develop such alternatives here, for want of time and space, I would minimally suggest that a "proper" "Heideggerian" and philosophical setting would look more like a cross between a traditional academic setting and a kind of exploratory "therapeutic" or "ashramic" one, one more interactive, personal, difficult, supportive, exploratory, experimental, personal, historically bound and grounded and more fully rooted to dwelling. This is but one example of what is a "nonviolent thoughtaction ground". Tom B. --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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