Today in pop-up salon, the topics of Heaven and the Kingdom of Ends came up, especially how these ideas seem to evoke a hellish kind of mechanistic being. I made the comment that I found all categorial ethical discussion to remind me of this. I semi-lightheartedly blamed this on my reading too much Nietzsche.

I just wanted to clarify that what I meant by that was not that any and all ethical consideration was bad merely because, for instance, it is restrictive, as I think a lot of people do interpret from Nietzsche. I don’t think this is the case and I don’t, for whatever it matters, think Nietzsche’s work supports this view on the whole either. It is merely that I don’t know how ethics can be thought categorially without necessarily appealing to the same transcendent values or, more importantly, the same transcendental forms of (e)valuation, that have til now also been the general forms of violence and instrumentalization.

I will have to think about this part but: I have the feeling that conceiving ethics categorially, as opposed to, say, strategically, is a reversal of what is general and what is particular about a given problem, analogous to the way capital’s alleged protection of the freedom of the individual over the whole is actually a demand for the sacrifice of individuals in the name of a non-existent whole. 

Since it was another thing I don’t think I communicate well, I want to add that this is closely related to but not exactly the same point as I was trying to make in seminar about the drive to make judgments about something like the decisions made by death camp prisoners. I think that both have to do with what appeals to me about mysticism like Benjamin’s but I obviously have a lot of working through these things to do.