I am trying to reply to Dom,
...
under some extreme circumstances, the "Occhio per occhio - dente per dente "
autarkical philosophy of justice might seem to both  the single individual
and the masses to
be the only possible answer .
Of course it isn't  - and the law , (the agreed generalized norms of
conduct ) is the sole depositary
of the has last word in matter of justice.
In Sartre's  "La nausee" everything seems unjust  and pointless to the
protagonist. Even music's  flagellating essence.Violent to the ear, to the
soul., while stressing the possibility of an to the being (say, it shows it
a style to be) , music states also the  brutal and factual state of things.
It has a negative ontological quality. Not merely the consolatory ability to
set an aesthetic alternative for the being.
If it shows something, it does it under the sign of unevenness.



Dom  wrote:
> Is it the only one
> available, though? Is literature not other than a weapon in the struggle
of
> the individual consciousness against the dead weight of idees recus?

Nothing  other than a weapon, you say?  Why such extreme vision?
Can't one say that it is also a weapon.


> Again, I find love vertiginous, confusing, but not violatory as such. I
used
> to worry that love might be violatary as such, and of others in the first
> instance; it seemed to me to be a good reason to refrain from it. I still
do
> think that if love were violatory of others, and it sometimes is, then
that
> would be a good reason to refrain; and that sincerity or the sheer force
of
> desire would never be a good enough reason not to refrain.

Life is not even, it is understood.Why should we simplify the problem? For
the sole sake of endurance?
(Then, Mersault was right. Once one disengage in the factual  or spiritual
things of the world (love, ambition, ect)
and retreats in a world of self-protective indifference and suspicious -
what point in living?
Camus final statement is that such an elaborated indifference is no less
damaging for the self than a death sentence:
enduring in a passive rationalized self-protective abstinence from the
(violent) aspects of the world is equal to be living in a world of dead . So
I feel inclined to agree with Alison when she writes:
> > Violence can be a neutral force: it is a human potential.  Although
> > people tend to think of it as only negative, it is a force within all
the
> > energies of our lives - within lovemaking, joy, birth.

But I think that maybe the word "violence" does not apply to this context:
the term aggressiveness of desire/drive (which can be reciprocated ) sounds
less out-law.
When these drives are acted at the expenses of passive victims we are in
front of a criminality
which is wrongly defined as sexual.
When the Fascist Italian Minister, grand-child of Il Duce, the famously
brainless Alessandra Mussolini,
(who was herself a porno-divetta) states on the TV that to punish the crime
of pedophilia the Justice should
castrate the offenders , the only thing she is proving is the smallness of
her skull's gray soft content.
Indeed, are you sure that once castrated these criminals would stop acting
criminally?
A criminal is such on every level. He acts criminally, thinks criminally, is
a criminal.

In general, I dislike Reich. I think he can be (and has been ) seen as the
cause
of many dangerous desperate misunderstandings of his theories.
I dislike his pseudo-revolutionary(proto-) Marxist idea of
liberation/liberty reducing itself to the free expression of our constrained
sexual orgasmic energies, oppressed by our (truly so) repressed sessuofobic
society.
I find it reductive.

Yet, I think that the Reichian idea of the  liberator mating (which implies
some degree of "aggressiveness")
cannot be associated to other fields of negative energies such as political
despotism.

If so, I ask you, to achieve political correctness should one
seek castration?
What if your partner in bed loves to have some grade of eroticism verging to
De Sade practices.
Would you abhor her/he? Think she/he is ill? Take her to the psychiatric
ward?
See her/he as worrying bestial or inclined to dictatorship?

(Read James Joyce's letter to Nora of the 7 september 1909:
" Now my darling Nora, I want to read over and over all I have  written to
yyou. Some
of it is ugly, obscene, bestial, some of it is holy and spiritual: all of it
is myself. ..."

Then read carefully letter 16 december 1909, 20 december 1909.
(Selected Letters of JAmes Joyce, Faber and Faber, edited by Richard
Ellmann.)

(Pause...)
Have you done it? What do you think of it? Is it a sweet domestic
non-violent love?
Uhmmmmmm.


EP






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