>"We live, as always we have, in an
>historic glasshouse of language; we can see out but only through the glass
>and it is not easy to cast a well-aimed stone that will not smash up more
>than was intended."; "Human language...is not some innocent civilian victim
>too defenceless not to fall at the first waves of warlike assault somewhere
>within the system, when the handy concordat of moral reason starts to
>shatter; it sits at the tables where war is planned and social consciousness
>manipulated and it services the justification of war aims and the
>rescheduled debt provisions of just, patriotic, necessary and humanitarian
>terms of engagement. Not one word of any language ever known to man has
>ever been innocent of these things; just as no human body has ever submitted
>to be expressively at the complete disposal of the mind that inhabits it or
>the meanings which that mind claims to deploy."
Still (I should read the whole essay, but it is such a fascinating
quote): there are civilians who are innocent of the operations of the
state which allegedly operates in their name; and the transcendent
category "humanity" which covers every person implicated in this state
doesn't mean that some are not innocent. Unless you subscribe to some
version of original sin, which covers simply being born; though I guess
here the sin is upon entering a condition of language.
Perhaps the edenic speculations because of the question of innocence...
The equation of the human body with the legislative/warlike tendencies of
language, a sort of inversion of subversion, is a bit puzzling. A
suggestion that the controlling mind is in fact a reaching towards an
illusory innocence. Rather than the other way around, as it were; for
try as I might I can't think of the body as _legislative_. (If you're to
pursue the mind/body duality, then I can imagine situating aggression in
the body; but that would be rather an animal function, which can't be
innocent or guilty.)
Hmmm?
A
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