Boddi wrote:
>As a fellow atheist I abhor killing because it destroys something
>extraordinary. Human life is the last thing on earth one should
>destroy.
But why? Other atheists don't answer the question in the same way, or easily. _____________________________________________________________________ http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004528.html
Traumatized by the Lisbon catastrophe, Voltaire becomes morbidly obsessed with nature’s amoral rapacity. When he surveys Nature, he confronts a Boschian Garden of Earthly Delights, a proto-Burroughsian universe of devourer-eat-devourer. The planet as charnel house. ‘Earth is a single battlefield.’ (The) Meat causes him revulsion. ‘Can anything be more horrible than to feed oneself on corpses?’
It is only a short step to Sade’s naturalization of cruelty. Since nothing is more natural than murder, ethics is a sentimental indulgence, an inevitably failed effort to provide solace for ourselves in a world of pitiless consumption and degradation. Sade’s arguments are so familiar – and Sadeanism, along with its successor Nietzscheanism, is so widely disseminated, so blanket accepted, both culturally and academically – that there is little point jumping on the grim hedonic treadmill of his thought again here now.
But the next figure in (Carlo) Ginzburg’s story is much less celebrated: Joseph de Maistre. Maistre was a theist who abominated the French Revolution but who nevertheless followed the logic of his faith by recognizing that its occurrence must be part of a divinely-ordained Necessity. Maistre is therefore in every sense the exemplary reactionary conservative.
What Maistre’s cold survey of ‘the universal law of violent destruction of human beings’ adds to Voltaire and Sade’s vision of earth as a charnel house is the notion of sacrifice. It is ritualized sacrifice which allows civil society to some degree contain the cosmic reality of Evil. While cruelty, for Sade, is distributed throughout the whole body politic, for Maistre, modern society manages to sublimate its destructive impulses by limiting its licensed practice to the work of two abject figures who occupy a liminal relation to the ‘ordinary’ human world their despised existence both protects and makes possible: the soldier and the hangman.
Ginzburg lingered with an obvious relish over Maistre’s astonishing, appalled-fascinated evocation of the hangman, the anti-social but socially-necessary psychopath and for Ginzburg, it is the combination of Sade and Maistre that makes possible, not only the flaneur-decadence and debauched tristesse of Baudelaire, but also Foucault’s studies of discipline and the carceral.