File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_2000/nietzsche.0009, message 53


From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 15:56:29 -0400
Subject: Re: violence




rutger h cornets de groot wrote:

> With Lambda back, violence is back, and with violence,
> life is back to this list. Welcome back, sir.

Sir, it would be a great mistake to call us that, since we are simply a
beehive of activity.

>
> > Violence is not something
> > that can or should be
> > eliminated...Violence - like science and knowledge -
> > can only be
> > employed, for it is not an abstract condition, but
> > the effect of a force
> > that may differ in nature according to its method of
> > employment.
>
> I am wondering what your thoughts are on what is
> currently known as "senseless violence".

We have no thoughts on the matter.  How could violence be senseless when its
sense is to excite the senses?  Maybe you should ask de Sade about this, and
then follow up on that through Reich and Klossowski.  If you look into the
matter ever so slightly, you will realize that every primary drive affects an
energy stock it intends to discharge and which, when undischarged ,
immediately finds another path towards satisfaction in the form of an
aggression directed at the resistance impeding the discharge.  That means, in
N.'s terms, that every drive is a constellation of forces dominated by that
active force that confers sense to the assemblage and guides its path, even
when trasnformed into primary agrression.  The long story of culture began,
not as Freud claimed, in the repression of these active forces, but as an
extension of the work of these forces upon the reactive unconscious, such
that the cruelty of primitive societies or savage bands was geared to repress
the reactive forces, to duct them, rather than conduct them.  However, as N
pointed out at length in GM, by a process of subtraction related to state
societies, the reactive forces succeeded in turning the active forces against
themselves, turning them inwardly, in a process that first originated
resentment - asa a collective mass scale training operation - and then
vengeance against life.  That is why all these half-baked hypo-Nietzscheans
are such fishwives, as you yourself have incarnated one - the word survival
is incrusted in their lips.  Trained long and hard by that latency of desire,
that repression of the active forces that migrated from resentment through
vengeance to latency and guilt (like, we must eliminate all violence!), one
must be fearful when they finally utter the word life: by that they mean
turning to barbarism once more.  All that is left to make you feel alive is
then the sense of senseless violence.  NBK: a graphism of the work of
survival promoted by capitalism as the intrinsic form of eugenic selection
belonging to the commodity system.


> I mean the
> social phenomenon where one gets beaten up for no
> apparent reason, whereas before one got beaten up at
> least because, for instance, one favored the wrong
> team.

No apparent reason, does not imply it is for no ratio at all.

>  If
> so, would it be too much to say that it has become one
> of the last metaphysical bastions in a world that is
> deprived of meaning? In other words, that violence now
> equals - "love"?

Much as it might pain one, that was only de Sade's mechanical approach to the
problem.  If a nonhuman love stands for the attraction of primary drives, a
nonhuman violence has always been its companion, not its equal, but its
difference.  The senseless violence that equals love in your proposition, so
characteristic of modernity itself, is the violence that belongs to human
love; it is indeed its unequalled equal.  And human love begins precisely by
wanting to eliminate its opposite, its equal.    Surely, that violence is
stupid;  but that love is no less so.   And without the latter, the former
would have no genealogy of force to support itself on.

LC




>



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