Date: Sun, 18 Aug 1996 12:00:58 -0700 From: ithomson-AT-ucsd.edu (Iain Thomson) Subject: Re: Oedipal issues Seems we have a lot of Oedipal issues... I will try and repond to those who responded--believing that the response is the beginning of responsibility, and co-respondence the beginning of community. Let me first second Michael's suggestion that we look at Heidegger's remarks on the Sophist(s), GA19. Anyone who has the text care to let fly with a passage or two? In response to Bob Scheetz; I was actually tempted to bring the thematics of the Holocaust into my post, but it was getting too long and I didn't have time to treat it with the care it deserves. Since that hasn't changed, let me just say a few things about the question of the distinction between 'Holocaust' and 'Shoah.' Those who say 'Shoah' do so because they want to avoid the connotations of redemption which 'Holocaust' presupposes. I raise this distinction because Heidegger (in the third Nietzsche lecture) considers tragedy asa redemptive act, as, per Zarathustra, a 'going under' in order to 'go over.' [see e.g. N3 p. 135]. But, at the same time, it seems pretty clear to me that Heidegger thought of the 'factical' Holocaust as an ontic symptom of an ontological "catastrophe" or "disaster" [Katastrophe]: "This fall [Abfall] into the nonessence of himself is uncanny [hat darin sein Unheimliches] in that it always seems harmless, in that business and pleasure go on just as before, in that it doesn't seem so important what and how one thinks; until one day the catastrophe [Katastrophe] is there--a day that needs perhaps centuries to rise from the night of increasing thoughtlessness [Gedanklosigkeit]. Neither moral nor cultural nor political standards extend to the dimension of responsibility [Verantwortung] in which thinking is placed [gestellt] in accordance with its essence." [1939: N3 112/NI 603] Is it the fact that even his supporters didn't like what Heidegger had to say about the Holocaust/Shoah (and for Heidegger the Q of 'Shoah' vs. 'Holocaust' is also the Q of our future paths in a Janus-Headed epoch of Enframing; the greatest danger and its possibility of the saving-power) that has lead so many for so long to maintain that Heidegger 'said nothing' about the Holocaust? Anyone who would talk about 'Heidegger's shameful silence' needs to read the Nietzsche lectures--if only from there perhaps to re-raise the Q of shame (and its exhibitionistic expresssion) in connection with his more infamous utterances, e.g., about the gas chambers and the motorized agricultural industry being of the same essence). If the saving-power if to be found in the greatest danger, then it is (for Heidegger) the fact that the Holocaust is a factical expression of ontological Seinsvergessenehit (and, suggestively, the 'oblivion' of Being) that holds out the hope: our recognizing this oblivion of Being from out of this disaster--that is for Heidegger the redemptive possibility inherent in this tragedy. (Who has the right to interpret this event? No one? Must it be remembered in its uninterpretability as pure disaster? That may be what 'Shoah' connotes.) Raising the Q (what Blanchot, Nancy and others call) "the disaster," can we also re-raise their concomitant question of the fate of the distinction between Poiesis and Techne? Perhaps the 'good' that this western culture still rewards is the good of techne, technical expertise, technique--and, while technique is an indispensible element of poiesis (the artist must have some technical know-how), what is lost when poiesis is lost is 'the making,' the altering, the simple everyday possibilities of and for change (evolutionary and revolutionary). Can technicity change the understanding of Being it presupposes, or does it dangerously reify that understanding, calling for poietic acts from within a technocracy, acts which perhaps begin to call the conditions of that ontopolitical understanding into question? (What are the conditions of redemption from/within Enframing?) We are treading here, none too lightly, over Qs (I would insist on the plural) of violence. For Tom, my post >is a >classic case of the failure to grasp the issue of (non)violence: violent >thought/action kills the father, nonviolent thoughtaction approaches the >problem of the *tyrant*, leaving *paternality* intact, albeit minus its >*dominance*. It is a serious failing to attach *paternalism* as such, >since there are, after all, fathers. Better to say, "the death of the >tyrant". Tom has chastised me several times for suggesting the ubiquity of violence. But who is being naive here? Perhaps I can address three last points (Tom's, Patrick Murphy's Q of the promise, and Paul Murphy's reconnection with Derrida's analysis) together: We need Paul's reminder (of the pharmakon in Plato's pharmacy) to mitigate Tom's (as a homeopathic counter-dose we should also address Heidegger's readings of Plato, as Paul and Michael both suggest). On the page Paul refers us to, Derrida writes: "Writing is parricidal." [Diss, 164] Children replace their parents. (Writing writes over the past.) Tom's dream, of killing only the father as tyrant, of leaving the good father intact and alive, this is a dream which (perhaps unfortunately) flies in the face of the existential reality to which Oedipus (to hardly mention Freud's staging of the primal scene e.g. in Totem and Tabboo) at Colonus attests. Petar Ramadanovic asks 'Who' the father is. That is precisely the Q., and these texts address the way life-in-time 'plays-out' the *changing* answers to that Q (documenting certain perils inherent to the porocess of transmission as well as providing a kind of program for successful transmission). Patrick raises the Q of the promise, and here we have to remember that Oedipus ellicits the promise from Theseus, who is not Oed's son but who is the King--and who has thus inherited the mantle from Oedipus (and thus is, in a sense, the true son). I would thus say that it is not so much a Q of good fathers (or mothers!) as of good children. What this means is that, given the fact of generation(s)--the fact about temporaly finite beings that we re-place those who came before--we *filter* the past for the sake of the future. This process is what Heidegger calls 'heritage' (over against a reifying 'tradition'). This simple existential faktung leads to an ethical responsibility for what we transmit to the future; we have to take responsibility for the inevitable filtration that goes on as we mediate the transmission of intelligibility through time. We can't not kill the father, sadly, but we may be able not to kill the children, hopefully, Iain --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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