Alison
I want to wait to tomorrow (a brittanic public holiday) to reply properly to
both your and erminia's (latest) posts on this intriguingly twisting thread
but I would say this for the mo - No language no Jews. I suspect we're both
arguing around the two faces of the same coin - language is real and
not-real, is power yet is powerless. Words, only words, but what they can
do.
btw to any on the list, my new ISP is in a time-zone all of its own so the
chrono-stamps on my posts 're all t'cock.
cheers
david
----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: brit poets <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2000 3:06 PM
Subject: Re: De Sade's manners of thinking
> David
>
> I believe utterly in the real of language. Which doesn't also mean that
> I don't believe in the unreal of it. Language is not the same as a
> thing, or as a reality. I really don't believe the world is a text, and
> I really don't believe reality is constructed out of language. It seems
> a rather satisfiedly anthropocentric view of things.
>
> >But also I know what killed six millions Jews - what did? - these, words.
>
> No, what killed six million Jews (and the Romanies and the homosexuals
> and the communists and the mentally disabled) was guns and gas ovens, and
> those willing to use them. Which is not to be glib, although it might
> sound like it. Really... And I don't think Sade had anything to do with
> that. Which is not to say that he can't be dangerous, but I think it's
> wrong (and surprising on this list) to dismiss him. If we are to
> dismiss the trangressors in literature, then we have to face the fact
> that "all forms of truth," as Sontag says, "are suspect and dangerous",
> and perhaps should all be censored.
>
> The place of language in the Holocaust is problematic, but (and here I am
> being trepidatious, because I know this is highly arguable, and a much
> more complex argument than I can make here) I don't think language was
> the primary criminal. If so, the intellectuals in Germany might have had
> some recourse when Hitler started clamping down in the 1930s and throwing
> Jews out of the universities. Naked abuse of power isn't about language;
> it's about its reverse. And the powerlessness of language in the face of
> such things isn't easily dealt with, by writers or anyone else. Perhaps
> especially by poets, who want to believe so utterly in the impossible:
> that is, that language and reality (and forgive me for the coarseness of
> my terms here, but I hope you know what I mean) might be able to meet and
> perhaps become the same thing. But they don't: there is always the gap
> between them, and in certain extremities, personal or social, the gap
> widens to an untenable degree. How important was the denatured language
> the Nazis used? They felt no need to justify what they did: the
> justification was a given, the language just a secondary problem of
> propoganda. How much the construction of the selves able to do this was
> a question of language, and how much a question of other things, is
> beyond my ability to judge: but if the Nazis had gone about their
> business without the trappings of authority, in particular violent
> authority, how much would they have been able to accomplish? And how
> useful would their language have been, if Germany had not been so
> brutally impoverished in the first place?
>
> Sideways from this: just been discussing Edward Bond's War Plays. They
> are as clumsy as I remembered: but in his essay after them, which is just
> as tedious, he argues that a human becomes human through his (advisedly
> using the pronoun) actions and technologies; so therefore a baby isn't
> human. But I think a baby is profoundly human, although incapable of
> speech or action; that is, even if its "me" is totally amorphous and
> unformed, it pre-exists the formation of language.
>
> Best
>
> Alison
>
>
>
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