--- On Thu, 3/12/09, Philip Pilkington <pilkingtonphil at gmail.com> wrote:
> model. With no society there are no "Others" as
> such and if there is no
> "Others" as such there is only the self and thus
> no responsibility. Without
> the proper ability to communicate with "Others",
> with society if the self
> feels like it needs to lash out and kill, then the self can
> lash out and
> kill... no problem.
>
[WS:] One may also argue that an act of "anomie" killing is a perverse form of "contact" with the other (as we are by nature social animals,) one written in flesh and blood if you will (cf. Kafka's _Penal Colony_). That is to say, extreme alienation and the lack of contact with the "other" produces a strong desire to establish such contact "for real" as opposed to fake interactions of a consumerist society. It is the opposite of a "frivolous" killing, especially that it often ends in the perpetrator killing himself at the end, achieving a sort of communion through death. In other words, what is natural (social contact) but denied in actual life (thanks to alienation) is ritualistically reaffirmed by death.
But we are getting awfully speculative here....
Wojtek