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>To speak of "self-shattering" is to imply that the self is brittle, >calcified, incapable of any dynamism on its own behalf. One must already >have despaired of the self's potential for creativity if the only way one >can imagine attaining to any kind of freedom is through the exercise of >ritualised self-annihilation. Well, think of Kafka's statement: "A book must be an axe to break the ice within". Or Wittgenstein's idea to the effect that solpsism, logically pursued, may be the only reality. Or any number of statements by any number of poets about the immolation of self: Keats' desire to "fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget", etc etc etc. How is a vocation for writing _not_ a continual dismantling of the made self? And may not the self be a terrible prison, as well as an armchair, blinkers, crippling (why am I thinking of Endgame?) It seems to me that literary writing is inescapably violent: that in order for writing to break down the legislative impulses of language, some kind of violence must be done. Just as love is a violation of the self's illusions of autonomy. (There is an interesting passage in The Culture of Redemption where the author, whose name escapes me, examines and explodes Freud's idea of art as sublimation, and reclaims it from its masochistic associations, which I remember thinking was very useful). 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. And we have to make our lives _every day_, like Goethe said. Can we have one side of violence without coming to terms with its other faces? Obviously, I think not: I think the inabilities to face ourselves is one reason why our society is so violent - towards the weak, towards the environment, towards each other. Why do we live in a society where drugs are prescribed as the answer to everything? Why does the WHO say that mental illness will be the most common disease in the world by 2020? But I am speaking metaphorically of real things, which you seem to deny Sade, though how you can take him literally, well, beats me. Yet you seem now also to be arguing for Sade against Kant, as having the superior understanding of human violence. Certainly Sade exposes the sham of Reason. I should say that violence, and the fear caused by violence, is to me no abstract idea pulled out to gratify some morbid intellectual frisson. One reason that I despise Andrea Dworkin. Best Alison %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%