19 December 2010

Violence is the opposite of covenant

Gift exchange is about excretion, be it of things with a creative life-force or of waste. 
Even ingestion involves excretion that is in some sense involuntary. So too childbirth has about it an involuntary aspect. The involuntariness comes of the need to expel what the person experiences as a negative, a bad. Waste is a bad. So too is a gift that is not passed on a bad. 
The difference between waste and issue is that the waste is understood as a bad by one's own species, while the issue is bad for the creator but good for the creature. So covenantal relations are those relations where the valuation from one party to the other is not just various, it flips around from a bad to a good or vice versa. 
That's where violence comes in. Violence is the opposite of covenant: party A considers life threatening, party B considers life enhancing. 
Your defeat is my glory. 

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