In another email that came through this week the journal A/V let me know that the paper I gave at the Manchester conference on ‘the event’ is now live on their journal.  I have been developing the paper a little more since then as it’s part of an ongoing project that I am working on and the more developed paper was given at the Greenwich University postgraduate conference yesterday, as a keynote address.

That was a strange event, with lots of interesting papers and some, as usual, that I simply didn’t understand, quite often the case in inter-disciplinary conferences.  I always find my notes form these conferences to be quite strange, littered as they are with various doodles and occasional sketches and the whole experience of conference going has a peculiar set of affects, from boredom and confusion to inspiration and sideways thoughts.  It’s very easy to forget whole swathes of fascinating material as you focus increasingly on single topics, with previous researches put on the shelf and gathering dust until something triggers a connection and suddenly boxes are pulled down and papers strewn everywhere in that search for a particular piece of paper, a particular underlining or note.  During the course of that search other things then turn up and the strange world of research becomes close, that strange world in which there is more than you realise in the background to what you do. 

The paper, the first section at least, called ‘To survive da’ath’, is available on A/V here.

I’ve not come across this journal before but a polite email asking me to post this call for submissions on my website seems worth responding to positively - and it looks interesting…

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR MONU9 MAGAZINE ON EXOTIC URBANISM

Notes on Heidegger - ITM (polemos, deinon and the gathering of distinction)

“war is the father of all and the king of all, and it has shown some as gods and others as human beings, made some slaves and others free” (Heraclitus, Fragment 53) - it is also worth noting something similar is said in Fragment 80, though this is not mentioned by Heidegger.

Heideggers’ translation takes this seemingly socio-political statement and reads it in terms of his central problematic of emergence and appearance.  “Confrontation is indeed for all (that comes to presence) the sire (who lets emerge), but (also) for all the preserver that holds sway.  For it lets some appear as gods, others as human beings, some it produces (sets forth) as slaves, but others as free” (ITM 47¹)

The war, the polemos, Heidegger contends, cannot be a mere socio-political fact since this is merely a human fact and it is necessary for the polemos under question to be prior to the human.  To ’show some as gods and others as human beings’ the polemos to which Heraclitus directs us “must hold sway before everything divine and human” (ibid).  Polemos is not mere human war, it is the distinguishing event that brings forth the human as distinct from the divine.  Polemos is thus also not mere divine conflict but prior to the divine as much as it is prior to the human.  Polemos is the ground of immortal mortality.

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