Hello there all,

                             don't have a clue if I ought to send these
posts in HTML or PlainText ( I suppose the latter) - um... don't know much
about computers etc.... Here's an attachment file anyhow.


And thanks for talking that oversized belly of a mail more seriously than my
grammar deserves...

 so:


Agreed with the Gillian Rose citation ( and glad to hear her name
mentioned!) but don't feel that it alters my point.


If definitions of 'reason' are difficult then the last few centuries have
spent their time thinking them rather easy. Agreed that Nazism, in all final
definitions  m u s t  be declared unreason - but this is reason itself
revolting against one of its former manifestations and thus setting
'reason', as an assumed generality, into question etc.  Anyhow, the former
could equally be remarked of Stalinism, Leninism, Comteanism etc. etc. and
all so-called 'scientific' sociologies....

Thus, I think it would be more accurate to describe Nazism as an example of
an attempted 'rationalisation' of society rather than get lost in questions
over the sovereignty or complexity of reason ( i.e. the Enlightenment
mapping, and instrumentalisation, of human knowing > Comtean positivism with
its corollary state religion > etc.) . Note Ernst Junger's Der Arbeiter, the
notion of  'total mobilisation' etc. ( though, agreed, due to the military's
hierarchy of command, a useless general such as Hitler controlled the major
strategic decisions - it's not such a leap to argue that if Rommell instead
had been in thorough control the results may have been different...) Thus I
would accept Bauman's argument that this rationalisation of society was
carried on into the manner in which the final solution was to be effected -
the whole tendency being to lessen the harmful and damaging irrationality
and inhumanity of the Eizentzgruppen, and replace it with a hygienic and
civilised machine of execution ( in that the killers weren't psychologically
scarred from having to massacre thousands, which would be seen as 'inhuman'
etc) To that extent the Nazis succeeded, and also to that extent the final
solution was necessarily a drawn out process: shipping> division of weak and
strong, or rather of useful and useless> gassing> hygienic cremation>
shipping etc. etc. Surely this process is eminently rational? Well, one
would say yes, it is rational in 'form' but one's whole mind, rationality
included, reels at the results; but such for me  i  s  modern rationality: a
form, a process - note the slow dissolve of moral categories in the Weimar
republic: one simple goose-step from there into Belsen? - as opposed to
something concerned with content, values and suchlike; i.e. the  i n s t r u
m e n t a l i s a t i o n  of rationality ( with us as with the
Nazis.......)


Think de Sade as opponent of death sentence a tad reaching - such
abstractions rarely reach the level of policy. The greater part of modern
opposition to the Death Penalty, anyhow, seems to me to rely on liberal
individualism with its attendant, though not consistent, talk of 'rights' as
set against what could only be seen, from those presumptions, as an
essentially arbitrary act of government. I'm sure there are more preferable
and stronger arguments against the Death Penalty, ones not so vulnerable as
the former to the postmodern critique of the liberal individual....

For me, de Sade is, actually, only interesting in so far as he provides a
prism through which French Enlightenment thought shone in its true light; as
a writer I find him intolerably tedious ( and thus the opposite of Diderot
etc.)




Sorry for the scrappiness of the above, but there 'tis.

ColinGHughes