I think I'd like to set Kafka and Wittgenstein, both of whom seem to have
longed in different ways for a abrupt breaking-down of the self's
presumptions and illusions (W. I think extends the problem of solipsism
beyond "consciousness" and into language, although for god's sake don't hold
me to this as I'm no expert, not even a beginner), apart from Keats who
imagines rather a dissipation or softening of the self - something quite
different. Why I prefer cannabis to flagellation, for instance, not that
I've really tried flagellation. Beckett, too, ranges art against a self that
is trapped, held firmly in place - tanks on one's inner lawn...
> 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.
This is to answer violence (the violence of the law, of the "legislative
impulse") with violence (the violence of "transgression"). I can't deny that
this is a very well-established literary scenario: differance or dialectic
of force (see Nietzsche, Foucault, Bloom even...). 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? This
seems like something of an idee recu itself, to me at least.
> Just as love is a violation of the
> self's illusions of autonomy.
This presupposes a self with illusions of autonomy. I wonder what love would
be for a truly autonomous self, or a not-even-illusorily-autonomous self.
What would it be like to love spontaneously, rather than in contravention of
one's supposed inner law? A very hippy-ish, Reichian sort of question.
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.
People make excuses for themselves, and literature I might add is littered
with such excuses, which are often lauded by readers as signs of the
authors' "humanity" and "compassion". Not, you understand, humanity towards
the violated, or much more than a nod towards compassion for them ("oh, you
poor thing. It must be terrible hard to be on the sharp end of such a
sincere and existentially rigorous desire. But the fact that you're now
bleating about how badly you've been treated proves that you're a neurotic
coward who had it coming - if you were the equal of our bold hero, you would
instinctively recognise and sympathise with the necessity of his impulses").
Rather "humanity" and "compassion" towards the reader who needs to make
excuses for himself, and who is relieved to find that others will make them
for him...
> 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.
I cannot think of violence as a neutral force. It always carries some
charge; it implies the existence of an enemy, somewhere. I wonder where the
enemy is in lovemaking. Is it oneself or the other? Whom is one trying to
kill?
>
> But I am speaking metaphorically of real things, which you seem to deny
> Sade, though how you can take him literally, well, beats me.
Because he literally flogged, poisoned, kidnapped, prostituted etc. etc.
etc. - and then also metaphorically, with added flourishes of spectacular
literary horror (which do not bother me nearly so much). I am not just
talking about books, or forms of "consciousness". I'm talking about praxis,
a way of going about things. Metaphors have their literal uses, although one
may have to be slightly mad to be susceptible to them...
Yet you
> seem now also to be arguing for Sade against Kant, as having the superior
> understanding of human violence.
Kant avec Sade? Well, yes, I think Sade's understanding of human violence is
at the very least a contender. Kant thought that some such thing as good
will might be sufficient in itself to ground a moral system. Sade shows, in
a phrase of Burroughs', "just how far human kicks can go", which as Steiner
says kind of pulls up the rug from under Kant's providentialism. Evil can
take the place of the absolute in Kant: it can be systematic, unopposable,
shameless. Sade declares that one should do unto others the evil that one
would have them do unto oneself in retribution, which is a kind of inverted
categorical imperative - I think this is what Massu stands for in Steiner's
anecdote.
> 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.
I don't think it's terribly abstract for her, either. Think of her as one of
Sade's whores, answering back - as they never get to do in Sade himself,
unless ventriloquised by him. Bataille has a bloody cheek calling Sade's
"the language of the victim". What did Rose Keller ever write, eh?
- Dom
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