Subject: Re: Heidegger in Germany
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 12:47:55 -0500


Yes, lumping them together is quite difficult, and yet, that is precisely
what is called for. The question of genocide must give us to a certain
provisional universalism. It is, essentially, a universalism of
nonviolence. I mentioned the Rwand genocide, not that I know much about it,
but because some recent critisms have viewed the US as having been rather
unresponsive to it. I am generally citing a kind of blind spot inherent in
some ways of "being" which seem to associate in general with blindness to
things that are genocidal, but which are at a kind of distance, and can be
shoved aside as unimportant. This is particulary important for
"philsophers", for nowhere is the matter of recognizing what is
*essentially* the case, rather than what simly appears this way or that,
more importnat. Nietzsche, indeed, notwithstanding. The linkage obviously
also entails Heidegger and his close proximity to genocide and torture of
the most extreme and unimaginable kinds. I will have to say that it is not
a case of the forgetting of being that is involved here, but of the active
remembering of Being, and its centration, rather than its being decentered
into, at the minimum, a double inquiry into both being and nonviolence. The
more I look at it the more it appears to me that it is not Being that has
tended to be forgotten, but nonviolence.

How such violences are put together, thought together, or, indeed, perhaps
lumped or smashed together is, as you say, quite important. But we can't
allow our nonviolence of thought to keep us from this important range of
possibility. That would be, then, a certian admitted violence of
nonviolence, a nonviolence that must admit within itself of a certain
violence, even if simply to say that it can not be avoided at times, but
not in the manner of rushing, as is usually done, to the conclusion that no
real thought should be given to nonviolence, that the inclusion of 
violence within nonviolence amounts to a simple contradiction, or that
there is no difference between the thinking that includes the violence of 
nonviolence within a full and free, properly infinite opening of
nonviolence as such, in word and deed, and that which simply in the main
does not.

TMB
----------
> From: Redlip-AT-aol.com
> To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: Re: Heidegger in Germany
> Date: Wednesday, January 27, 1999 10:10 PM
> 
> Interesting remarks and I want to think about them, though off the top of
my
> head i would say that quite possibly you are citing examples of a
> 'foregetting' of being. But of course this becomes very complex. The
> atrocities in Rwanda differ so profoundly in historical terms from, say,
> violence on the urban streets of the Untied States that it is difficult
even
> for the purposes of this specific discussion to lump them together.  I
hope to
> come up up with a more thought out answer and look forward to others
> responses. js
> 
> 
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