Date: Tue Jul 25 20:20:18 1995
Subject: authenticity/violence/torture


Authenticity/violence/torture: 1
 
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"...it struck me that, as you all recall I'm sure, one of  
the most famous--and productive--mis-readings of H. on 
authenticity is Sartre's "bad and good faith."  (This was 
on my mind having just written a piece on, believe it or 
not, Sartre and street gangs, and also Richard Rorty 
approvingly mentions Satrean ethics in a nice piece in 
the latest NEW REPUBLIC that reviews Feyerabend's 
autobiography--did you know he was an officer in the 
German army in WWII?  BTW, if you want, the NEW REPUBLIC 
is on the web and you could get the review online for 
free.)  At any rate, the way the problematic was always 
presented to me was one of Sartre in the resistance (he 
was, as I recall, a minor courier, after imprisonment) 
wondering why some people break down under torture and 
some don't.  Everyone was wondering how THEY  would hold 
up.  For S, the inauthentic bad faith move is to say 
"they made me tell" because, it seems, there was always 
that millisecond longer you could have held out, so it 
was YOU that made the choice.  Very rigid on 
responsibility!  Authenticity has a lot to do with owning 
up to your own responsibility for the choice, in all 
areas of life.  There's a heck of a lot more to be said 
here, of course, but I'll wait to see if this line of 
inquiry resonates at all; it's certainly a way, a la Tom 
B., of tying authenticity and violence together (though 
the torture example is just that, an example, of a more 
general phenomenon). "
 
--- This is a very interesting theme. As a student of 
attribution theory in psychology, and having in certain 
ways either deconstructed this rubric or complicated it 
to the extreme in some theoretical work, I'm very, very 
suspicious of this rigid kind of formulation and example. 
This is a rich "in" to the discourse on violence.
 
The theme you suggest is "tying authenticity and violence 
together". My inclination on this is to say that it is 
not authenticity per se which is to be "tied" to 
violence, but various conditions concerning something 
like the discourse on authenticity. I am tempted to 
proceed with an example, and most facile here of course 
would be one of torture. I think such examples might be 
fully necessary, but I have been finding that the issue 
of example and the question of violence are connected in 
very intimate and perhaps essential ways. For this 
reason, I want to stop for a moment and bring notice to 
the *very being* of the example.
 
The example of the Situation is projected in within the 
horizon of the question of violence. The example 
constitutes the projected/virtual actuality which is put 
forward to be understood in light of the question. In the 
condition of making an example, there is a certain 
freedom to develop many different examples, counter 
examples, etc. This amounts to: variation and the 
intution of essence. For example: a person tortured for 
one hour, two hours, one day, two days, not fully 
tortured, tortured to the extreme. Those are all 
variations. They themselves are not torture. They are not 
the violence that is torture. We are not going to rush 
out and actually torture in order to learn of choice, the 
limits, the "hows" of confession under torture, etc. Why 
not? It would be violent.
 
We are not asking "what is violence?" But we are moving 
within the horizon of the question of violence. We 
interpret events and situations according to this 
question while we are always already in the condition of 
maintaining ourselves according to the possibility of 
violence (as bad). More of the lived-world hermeneutic 
circle. Nothing surprising here.
 
I am *activating* the theme of violence. When a theme is 
raised as activated, other things are in a certain 
subordination to this theme. For example, the question of 
authenticity. We can hope to tie the question of 
authenticity to the question of violence, so long as we 
do not hope that the very discourse on authenticity and 
good/bad faith will itself constitute the very thematic 
horizon of violence itself.
 
My claim is that Heidegger, and let me add, Sartre, do 
not give violence itself a fully substantive engagement 
and independent thematization in their analytics of 
Dasein/human reality. I alluded to this, or said so 
directly as well, I think, in previous posts. I suggested 
that a suspension of "the moral" constituted a kind of 
ladder which enabled an ascension into a certain "plane", 
while at the same time suggesting a return to the ground 
from which this ascension took place. The products of the 
work on that plane, upon such a return, would be 
something like a "residue" of adequate, essential 
definitions, groundworks, topologies, and so forth. The 
return to the ground of the existential analytic would be 
a certain immersion in the "moral". The moral as such 
constitutes the world as it is bound by and caught up in 
the ongoing condition of the possibily of violence. The 
immoral is or may be: violence. For Levinas, injustice 
*is* violence. I tend to agree with this.
 
I call this return to the "moral ground" a "return to the 
positivities". The plane of remove constituting the 
existential analytic is one which converts the actual 
into example. For example: Dionysus is converted 
categorically to: a god. A die is converted into an 
example of an object, per se, in order to subject it to 
variation to clarify the structures of subject-object 
consciousness, for Husserl. When Heidegger supposedly 
returns the die to the crap table, to determine all the 
better the structures of Dasein, not either to gamble or 
to address the moral conditions of gambing. Yet this 
address has some considerable motivation lying in the 
good of authenticity and the potential violence of 
inauthenticity, the danger of the loss of inauthenticity, 
the "unheahty" of authencity not being able to find 
itself out of inauthenticity. It does not constitute a 
"return to the world" but a most extreme elevation and 
expansion of the psychism inhereing in Descartes' moment, 
Husserl's transcendental ego, etc. The selfworld is taken 
as example for Heidegger to give the structures of 
Dasein. Again, the moral tenor of his addressing this 
problem operates behind his text, though its "first 
sweep" is a neutral commitment to the western 
philosophical project: here's a question to pursue: 
Being. Why pursue it? This question and its answer is not 
really developed until later, when the development of 
Heidegger's thought is brought into contact with 
conditions like homelessness, technology, the condition 
of internationalishm, humanism, the manufacture of 
corpses, and so forth. That the question has not shown 
its moral raison d'etre papers is not a fault in my 
opinion, but goes into the very problem of authenticity 
and Being. In other words, that is, to a certain extent, 
how it is with such major aspects of being, the "State of 
Being", so it is not necessary to ask for a moral 
grounding of the "State of Being", though it may be 
*possible* to do so. We preserve here a certain 
independence and autonomy of philosophy.
 
We can say here that Satre brings the analysis of human 
reality more quicly and more concretely back in certain 
ways in order to interpret the conditions of his world. 
He was much more able then Heidegger to address actual 
conditions and to "operationalize" his "theory" of human 
reality by showing how it *handles* specific examples and 
provides a ground or abground for Situations.
 
We take Heidegger as representing an "unreturned" 
analytic of Dasein, and Sartre as representing a 
"returned" analysis of Human Reality. Sartre's examples 
are more specific, but Heidegger gives simple and 
plausible examples from time to time as well, such as 
Dasien finding its head after the disruption of a fire in 
a house.
 
I am, in a very provisional way, "backtracking" in order 
to situate this post in the horizon of the question of 
violence. I am trying to lay out a context of the actual 
and the example, a situation of "remove" and thought 
within which the freeplay of variation is possibile for 
the sake of clarification along the path of developing 
understanding.
 
In the condition of the direct, the direct relation to 
the positivities in the world, I do not so much speak of 
the torturer thematically: I face the torturer, I face 
torture. More than that: I *am* tortured. Or I have the 
option to torture, to act, to do, I torture. And not only 
torture, of course, which as a magnificently extreme 
example, but: eat breakfast, make love, take my dog for a 
walk, etc. Facing, let me select "torture", I or others 
my speculate on when I might "break down". I am in the 
actual condition of *choice*, but to be sure, as well, of 
violence, pain, terror, disruption, trauma, rupture. But 
at the same time as well, politics, society, war, 
alliance, secrecy, etc.
 
There is not, we are told time and again, time to think 
in the face of such pressing conditions. "We must act!" 
We must: resist torture, remain silent in great pain, 
make war against torturers, torture the enemy or adhere 
to human rights codes, etc. We have a *choice* and the 
choice must be made. We do not have time for a *discourse 
on choice*, on the *conditions of choice*. We must 
confront violence. Likewise, we will be given to 
understand, we do not have time for a *discourse on 
violence*. We're talking about *real* violence and we do 
not have time to sit around and philosophize. We do not 
even have time, in such a condition as torture or some 
will say, in the condition of any pressing realities, to 
pursue *even this discussion admitting the possibility of 
its own impossibility*. Some might say that instead of 
pursuing this discussion, I should really be writing 
letters to the editor concerning Mumia Abu-Jamal. While 
that man faces nearly certain execution in likely corrupt 
circumstances, I'm sitting around and philosophizing.
 
We are *thrown* into the conditions of violence and must 
act and choose. Choice is: a decision concerning action 
in and among conditions. We must choose our action from 
among possible actions. We are to be judged according to 
such actions, but even before judgment, we are already 
submitted to the effects of such actions. If I choose, 
given the opportunity, to shoot my torturer, even before 
I am judged (a hero, perhaps), the torture is dead, and I 
am not tortured. There is no exit from this condition 
into the freedom to turn examples around like a die which 
is as meaningless to us as any simple thing present at 
hand. We are not free, but at the same time we are free 
to choose, among conditions and opportinies, and possible 
actions. We have the freedom of the moment of decision. 
This has been called a "mad" moment: mad because we must 
drop thinking altogether and *decide*. 
 
We must do so because the possibility of violence presses 
immediately. It is positively necessary to act and 
choose. If we choose not to decide, we are told, we have 
in fact chosen whatever condition ensues in that absence 
of decision. We are, supposedly, even responsible for 
that. If, when being tortured, we choose not to decide 
whether to resist the torture and remain true to our 
countrymen by not revealing information, the force of 
torture itself will bring us into some response. In our 
unmindful lack of decision, we will likely end up 
revealing secrets. So if we refuse to choose, we are, 
supposedly, *choosing* to reveal secrets. We are in the 
condition of action. We must act, right away!
 
"And yet", Heidegger cautions us, "it may be that 
prevailing man has acted too much and thought too 
little." (not exact quote)
 
Let us go back to the theme of "tying violence and 
authenticity together". Provisionally, I will suggest 
that such a tying is not really possible in any simple 
way, any more than for Heidegger it is possible to 
discussion authenticity without in the process laying 
open the entire existential anlytic. So, I have a choice 
here: to either work to develop a full-blown discussion 
of violence or to hastily tie the questions of violence 
and authenticity together. If I make a bad choice, I will 
load myself up with some guilt. I don't want to be 
guilty. It's gross. I am first and foremost responsible. 
Guilt constitutes the situation of judgement according to 
the effects of my free decisions. I am free to decide 
whether or not to pursue the question of violence in 
various ways. And I am responsible. But even now, I am 
already bound in the condition of choice, in that I must 
choose whether or not to pursue the question of choice 
and the question of violence. If I don't pursue this, 
there will be no such discourse forthcoming from me. I 
will be responsible for its absence. Perhaps such a 
discourse could change the conditions by which Mumia's 
fate is being decided. This is unlikely at best, unless 
something dramatically different from the usual division 
between thought and action takes place.
 
But it could be that prevailing man has observed the 
prevailing distinction between action and thought to 
much, and has stood in the activated difference between 
the two too little.
 
A certain freedom of synthesis will permeate what is to 
follow. I initiate the activation between thought and 
action within this thinking on violence and authenticity. 
I will call this progression a "thoughtaction", with some 
empahsis, in this case, on thought. I suggest that the 
question in question can not in fact be addressed 
adequately at all without the very activation of the 
difference between thought and action. The question, of 
violence, constitutes and independent thematic-
substantive.  
 
In order to *activate* the theme of violence the very 
condition of that within which any "theme" occurs must 
itself be an *activated difference between thought and 
action*. We must ask, then: but why? Why can't we just 
think freely about the theme of violence? Shouldn't we be 
able to develop and essential definition of violence? 
Determine its conditions of possibility? After all, we 
have the torture example, plenty examples, really, of 
violence, which we could study infinitely. Given the 
violences of this century, and really all the centuries 
before this one, it might seem like one of the best 
things to do to pursue the question of violence with a 
certain independence.
 
An easy response here would be to note the observations 
of respectable thinkers that philosophy has often set up 
its home of thought by means of a certain violence. But 
it is not clear enough to me that a violently obtained 
research space/institution/tradition/ground can not never 
the less adequately pursue the question of violence. It 
is plausible, but I'm looking for something different 
than that kind of grounding for the reason for 
thoughtaction because it seems to me that there is 
something more essentially constitutive for the question 
of violence that determines why thoughtaction, and 
neither thought nor action alone, can serve as a proper 
ground.
 
The circular hermeneutic condition is such that what we 
question is something of which we already have some kind 
of understanding. This condition can lead quickly to a 
general theme of *acquaitance* and *competence*. One 
pursuing the question of violence should perhaps have 
more than a passing acquaintance with violence, for 
example. Doing so in conjunction with the writing of 
Heidegger requires, at the very least, that one has an 
intellectual competence to make one's way through his 
forest of thought. We presume Heidegger to be wise as 
acquainted and competent when we must expect that 
Heidegger had more than a passing acquaitance with Being 
toward Death, and all of the other major themes of his 
phenomenology and thinking. When I first read Heidegger, 
I found myself positing a kind of "wise man" who wrote 
his texts, bringing into relief and articulation what 
were robust experiences for him. And yet, of course, we 
ourselves must either be wise or become wise in order to 
grasp the movement of his thought.  Sartre's discussion, 
and even much of his trajectory in "existentialism" was 
born out of his acquaitance with things like the Nazi 
occupation of France, his military service (as is borne 
out by his notebooks from that period), etc.
 
But to be acquainted with violence is to be in its 
proximity in certain ways, and to be in its proximity is 
to be in its conditions of dilemma. How do we know this? 
The suspended discourses of the positivies give answers 
which, presumably, we all already know: love thy 
neighbor, no man is an island, I am my brother's keeper, 
the discourse on fates, the call of the other, stories of 
action, politics, war, peace, a time to love, stories of 
revenge, etc. We know, though perhaps in certain ways it 
is little spoken of, that if one near is in trouble, we 
should act to help him or her. A mother loves her child, 
as does a father, or should. For Gandhi, a cow's heart 
fills with love at the approaching calf who comes to 
suckle. Thou shalt not kill. The Rights of Man.
 
If we are to question concerning violence, we must enter 
into its proximity and we must attain to wisdom. Our 
acquaitance means at the same time either our action in 
response to violence, or some justified inaction or 
alternative action. If we seek a master discourse to 
determine that action in proximity is possible or 
necessary, we will of course fall right into the very 
problems which have created the scandals of the moral 
whose fame have arisen slowly in moral consciousness and 
lead to the death of God. We are no more have the freedom 
to appeal to textual resources as absolute guides or 
producers of master narratives than Dasein's 
responsibility can be adequately accessed via guilt as 
interpretive condition or principle. Yet, the thrown 
individualization of Dasein in its capacity for guilt, 
for having a conscience, constitutes a certain and 
definite radicalization of the ownmost condition 
regarding responsibility, and hence regarding violence.
 
As primarily futural, Dasein projectively anticipates and 
chooses, according to Heidegger, among potentialities for 
being and has as its guide and grounding principle guilt 
as: being a perpetrator of violence as responsible for a 
lack. If Dasein is always guilty, then Dasein is always 
violent. Guilt is not the falling of Dasein in the sense 
of inauthenticity, though it is the falling of Dasein in 
the sense of violence. In this sense Heidegger 
recapitulates a thorough Aristotelian gesture of 
complicity with the state, in that someone who has failed 
to properly lynch a "nigger" may well feel guilty in that 
Dasein. The morality of Being and Time, far from being 
Fundamental in the central sense implied by the work is, 
in this sense, a regional appropriation of the moral 
force/condition.
 
Guilt in the first instance means: responsible for a lack 
in another. Violence.  The "nigger" may or may not be an 
other, depending on the Dasein and the status of the 
movement to include all humanity in the conception of 
what is, in certain ways, "the same", and hence what can 
be "another". Before this first instance of guilt is 
responsibility as a part of a fundamental relation to the 
other: being with others, which may or may not be 
essentially love of various kinds (erotic, filial, agape, 
etc.), or contractual, or something else. Guilt is both 
"how it goes" and at the same time the *understanding* of 
how it has gone with regards to this moral ground in 
conjunction with a certain independent condition, if 
itself *conditioned*, of freedom. 
 
The discourse concerning violence must arise within the 
primordial relation to the other if it is to have 
veracity and sufficient date for its development. If the 
positings of existentialia in Being and Time are even 
moderately correct we can presume provisionally that 
Beings who speak will maintain themselves understandingly 
within this relation and will develop this understanding 
through discourse. This is of course a somewhat 
artificial formulation, since we already know that this 
is the case.
 
The discourse concerning morality and hence violence has 
made reference to the Being of "man/humanity/men and 
women" en route to accomplishing itself. The discourse on 
the Being of "man/humanity/men and women" has developed 
the clarification of this Being in an independence from 
the pressing dilemma, this "en route" of the moral 
(within a certain range of action) in order to pursue its 
question with regional freedom. With regards to the 
moral, fundamental ontology, which is the ontology that 
can say "regional ontologies" is itself regional in a 
certain sense. This is possible only if in some 
fundamental way Being is already given, if in a certain 
way, Being "leads", already "is". This is the final 
development of Heidegger's thought, which is considered 
by some to be something more "mystical" in Heidegger's 
writings.
 
When we characterize the freedom to pursue the question 
of Being as free from the actional demands of the moral, 
we may never the less be speaking of another kind of 
action, and another moral situation, albeit one which 
does not appear, which may in fact systematically not 
appear, in certain ways. What is actional will say that 
this freedom is the choice of non-action, the non-
activity of thought, and that even thinkers themselves 
are guilty of certain inactions. And the thinker will 
accuse the actional of being thoughtless, of ploughing 
forward en route to ends.
 
In any event, the discourse concerning violence must have 
some contact with violence, just as the discourse on sex 
and sexuality gains credibility when its participants are 
themselves sexually wise in at least some minimal sense. 
This does not mean that in the case of violence one 
should actually be violent; one should be in some active 
and experienced contact with what is violence if 
necessarily in the role of working to prevent and 
ameliorate violence. It is interesting that Foucault, who 
taught us to identify the violence of the confessional, 
proceeded never the less to embark on a prolonged study 
of sexuality. Ostensibly the better to ameliorate a 
certain violence through the revelation of the 
genaeological anlysis. What neither Foucault nor 
Heidegger undertook was a straightforwad discussion of 
violence. I see Foucualt as trapped in a certain way in 
the distension of thought. The "moral force" is 
systematically rendered in certain ways impotent, and 
operates behind the scenes. I think the same is true for 
Heidegger.
 
Is it possible that what what lies closest to us is the 
question of violence? But of course along with this 
possibility is any number of "positivities" such as love, 
our relationships to those we love, etc. We know the 
primary loci of the discourses on love, notably, but not 
exhaustively, psychoanalysis and Christianity. These are 
at the same time the primary sites of institutional 
activity, and in a certain, often truncated way, thought 
concerning violence. The activation of the question of 
violence as the opening to free discourse the conditions 
of possiiblity of violence in the grossest senses, the 
conditions of love, relation to the other, etc., might 
necessarily involve stepping into spaces which are in 
certain ways "staked out" by these and other such 
institutions.

---
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.

Tom Blancato
tblancato-AT-envirolink.org
Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)




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