File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0310, message 60


Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 04:37:43 +0000 (UTC)
From: anonymous <tlewis-AT-sdf.lonestar.org>
Subject: Re: Spectre of Madness


Steve wrote:
>
> 150,000 people die each day and 300,000 are born. My point remains that
> if you remove the oppressive and murderous behavior from the equation it
> is simply absurd to respond to the normal cycles of life and death as
> something to 'care'  about in the mass.  Rather we should accept that
> emotions and personal relationships are precisely that personal. (Though
> some interesting and important attempts have been made to write
> histories of human emotions). On a social and political level my pitiful
> levels of involvement are not related to the individual suffering of the
> persons concerned but rather related to an engagement with the social.
>
> If however you believe that an emotional engagement with the fact of
> 150,000 people dying and 300,000 being born is a necessary starting
> point - perhaps raising the case of the people murdered and tortured
> each day as an especial case over and above the normal deaths in car
> accidents and from cancer that occur - then I would have to ask why are
> these latter types of people a special case and how would you
> differentiate the various sub-types.( i.e. People sentenced to death in
> the USA, the concentration camp in Guantanomo Bay, the murder rate in
> South Africa, the World Bank created famine in Botswana and so on). And
> in the differentiation how you would select which actions to engage in
> to change things.

"But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion
of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can
*do*. Things only happen". - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"


   

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