Some stuff from Serres

I'm feeling a little drained hence anything I write in this post won't be great. I finished reading Serres & Latour's Conversations on Science, Culture and Time and the last conversation entitled 'Wisdom' made me think alot so while I'm thinking things through I'm not very good at writing about them. However, there were a few passages that made me think of the current situation in Iraq so I thought that I would post them:

'There is a terrible and secret equation between the unjust and abusive deaths and tortures produced by a tyrannical empire and the cadavers left by the tribal hatred and warefare in the same empire when it breaks apart so that the same amount of violence seems to be conserved at the heart of any given human distribution.'

'It's better to find a symbiotic equilibrium, even fairly primitive, than to reopen a war that is always lost because we and the enemy find renewed force in the relationship.'

'So, then, what is the enemy? Often a collection of partners that I have myself produced and with whom I am conditionally and continually obliged to contract.'

I thought that these seems particularly significant of the current atrocities being committed at Abu Ghraid prison. One side is determined to remove what it percieves to be evil and only perpetuates another evil. What they supposedly sought to eradicate has shown up in themselves and it seems that there is going to be a continual chain of one atrocity being commited because the other side committed an atrocity and on and on. There is a terrible circle of violence that no one is willing to break. Those that consider themselves to be rational are perpetuating the violence and neither side looks like it will ever be willing to give.

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