2.95
The gods war amongst each other: this means there are other arrangements of world and things. We can turn to things themselves and ask them how would things be if the gods war amongst each other?
Going back to things themselves is powerful. – Power and authority are bound up with relations to and interpretations of phenomena. Nietzsche noticed that naming things and expressing relations is central to power.[1] Baudrillard described how the system of value and signs, of capital (i.e., a system of relations), holds power through unilateral giving, for relations of giving express relations of power.[2] Particular relations with things, informed by metaphysics, are then expressed when we relate to others.
Why were Indigenous languages and cultures in places like Canada seen by settlers as threats? Why was the heterodoxy that crystallized around witches in the Middle Ages seen as a threat? Why was the Church concerned with heathens? —— In part, because these offered alternate loci of power, alternate ways of relating to things (of naming things, relating to the land, giving, receiving, exchange, and devoutness): they offered alternate interpretations, metaphysics, and ontologies.
Through an authority, such as the state, interpretations can be locked down with the threat of physical violence.[3] Through the system of value, capital, and signs, power and interpretations have been secured.
My text can be understood as a call to (re)claim power through relating to things themselves.
Different words, dispositions, practices, and relations can be enough to bring forth the wrath of authority, for they challenge it. Authority is often sensitive in a way not indicative of strength, but of weakness: “As a community grows in power, it ceases to take the offence of the individual quite so seriously [….] ‘What do I care about my parasites’, it could say, ‘let them live and flourish: I am strong enough for all that!’”[4] — But faced with challenges, there’s no choice but to respond (within the structure of gift-logic and the challenge (§2.58)) — the question is how they do so.
What is silenced in the consolidation of power is never just human voices, but also things themselves. This isn’t just violence: it’s ontological violence, ontological devastation.
[1] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 12.
[2] Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 36–7, 40, 42–3.
[3] Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 78–9.
[4] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 47, 48.