From: "fuller" <fuller-AT-bekkers.com.au>
Subject: Re: Unsafe at any speed
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 00:36:53 +0800


Eric,

> Now, as to your question about playing it safe, as an armchair
philosopher,
> I would respond as follows. I think it is ultimately a question of
> individual taste.  Certainly, for some, living dangerously is a way to
> become more alive, to feel the vital juices flowing like the green fuse
> itself. Others, however, may not need to experience these shocks, these
> gentle caresses of flirtatious death in order to feel alive. They have
> realized it already as their native state. They merely breathe and slip
> into ecstasy. Still others are merely numb and fallen into a dreary
> half-life. Not even a ride in a fast car will save them.
> In the end, perhaps, it is more a question of hormones than ethics.

Hahaha. Yeah, perhaps, except for the stereotypical middle-age crisis
scenario.... then it would be merely a question of taste or a lack of it.

>Others, however, may not need to experience these shocks, these
>gentle caresses of flirtatious death in order to feel alive.

According to the narrative, Epicurius himself almost died though, believed
himself as beyond hope, isn't that what precipitated his philosophical
movements? He required a (post?) near-death experience to return to his
innate condition, to be set free from the interpolatory effects of the death
drive.

>In my reading, on the contrary, I believe what Epicurius discovered was not
>nihilism but bliss. He realized that this condition was our innate and did
>not require any kind of moral or external justification.

To play the devil's advocate, could not the non-requirement of a
justification for the blissful, innate condition be the effacement of the
authority of justification?
Perhaps I need to understand exactly what this innate condition is...

I wrote an essay linking Badiou's Ethics with an anti-speeding campaign we
had showing on our tellies at the time. The ad was based on a new car ad,
bouncing music, swerving car, obtuse camera angles, connoting fluid motion,
fun, and speed, then the ad suddenly and unexpectedly has the car hitting a
pedestrian. The feeling of speed (as signified by the new car ad) was linked
to the 'feeling' of death. The basic form of my argument was the
anti-speeding ad was an Event as per Badiou, and would enable speeding
drivers to associate speeding with death, therefore reassess the processes
by which they constituted everyday judgements and what not.

Glen.