Through language, we rub on each other's self! In this friction we polish our being.
Friday, 7 May 2010
Elder: Individual and Society and the question of power
One powerless possibility for a shared historical truth that breaks the mould is to come to conceive social and political power differently from how it has been conceived, mostly implicitly, throughout the history of metaphysics. The phenomena of human beings sharing the world in interchange with each other point to the limits of mono-archically conceived productionist, metaphysical power, for metaphysical power is always thought as a starting-point residing in one being governing a change, a metabolh/ in another being. Monotheism, in particular, thinks within this mono-archic paradigm by positing the a)rxh/ as a supreme being. In questioning powerlessly, we ask: Does not the reciprocity of the free exchange and interchange (metabolh/ in its other sense) between and among human beings, even today, still await its appropriate conceptualization, no longer subsumed (implicitly) under key metaphysical concepts from du/namij and e)ne/rgeia through to Nietzschean will to power in which power is always thought mono-archically? By virtue of the ontological peculiarity of human beings as ineluctably free beings cast individually and singularly out into an historically shared, universal, open truth of being, all interchange among them is a power play that, paradoxically, is situated essentially outside the reach of any metaphysically conceived power and therefore within a realm of powerlessness. In particular, there is no metaphysically conceived power capable of achieving a lasting unity of truth (e.g. a theocracy) or practical agreement among a plurality of individual emanations of freedom; any unity is a unity on recall, until the next outbreak of dissent and conflict. The yearning for the one (to\ e(/n) must give way to acceptance of the many (ta\ polla/).
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