Dauve

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Dec 26 2009 07:31

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Dauve

Given the recent discussion, I thought a fresh, smear-free thread would be in order. Please keep the discussion to verified, legitimately sourced and preferably english information. It does seem like an important conversation to have without the vicious anti-Dauve hysteria and vitriol featured elsewhere. Here are a couple of legitimate questions by others I would also like more information about.

Vlad336 wrote:

Dauve is an influential thinker in modern libertarian circles, and yet hardly anyone knows anything about his background.

revol68 wrote:

what is the basis for accusations of defending Paedophilia, I'm interested in this because in a few of Dauve's texts I think he runs too far in his 'anti moralism' and I can see how it could possibly sit fit with, if not an actual apologism, perhaps a kind of dismissal of the issue as being little more than a side concern of bourgeois morality.
Likewise I think his comments about the Holocaust in Fascism and Anti Fascism are too glib and don't address the specific mechanisms of the Holocaust that make it stand out from other genocides, but that doesn't get close to making him a negationist.

I agree with the fact that he often seems a bit glib about taboo type stuff, but from what I understand it was this quote, "The concentration camps are the hell of a world whose heaven is the supermarket." that caused the negationist allegation trouble. If it is only that and guilt by association, then I think it's probably the end of the story. This text is much less glib and far more direct than the X-filers from what I remember.

There was talk awhile ago about doing an interview with Chomsky. Is there any chance the libcom group would be interested in doing the same with Dauve?

Dec 26 2009 10:14

Steven.

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regarding the alleged defence of paedophilia, Jef Costello referred to this text as such:
http://libcom.org/library/alice-monsterland-troploin

But then he said he only read the beginning of it. Having read the whole of the text, I don't get this from it in the slightest. I wonder if with a full reading Jef would stand by that comment?

Regarding the Holocaust denial, it is clearly a complete lie, as demonstrated by the texts linked to above from "what's it all about?".

The role played by Dauvé's father in allegedly helping break the communist movement in France during and after World War II is very interesting, but of course is not Dauvé's fault at all - if anything it is a credit to someone's ability not to be conditioned by their parents' views.

Dec 26 2009 11:16

osobo

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Auschwitz - the big alibi
didn't find anything "negationist" there

Quote:

Is there any chance the libcom group would be interested in doing the same with Dauve?

it would be fucking great, yep

Dec 26 2009 11:21

(Reply to #2) #4

jef costello

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Steven. wrote:

regarding the alleged defence of paedophilia, Jef Costello referred to this text as such:
http://libcom.org/library/alice-monsterland-troploin
But then he said he only read the beginning of it. Having read the whole of the text, I don't get this from it in the slightest. I wonder if with a full reading Jef would stand by that comment?

I think it's a bit unfair to pick out a one line comment in libcommuntiy and then put it out into the part of the site designed for actual political thought.

Quote:

After Freud, it is hard to believe that there is such a thing as a clear cut easily defined "sexual object".
It would be absurd to include Don Juan and Juliet's Romeo in the same category of "lovers". Whoever enjoys torturing cats is zoophobic, not zoophilic. A man like Dutroux in
Belgium was raping and killing teenage girls and women. A man like Andre Gide would make love to young boys. Why amalgamate two utterly different types of behaviour in the same notion of "paedophilia" ? Only Law and Order politicians call "drug addicts" both the hash smoker and the person who needs his fix twice a day. "Paedophilia" is just as intellectually relevant as "drug use". We're all paraphiliac.

I think that this is extremely close to the defences of paedophilia which we are all too accustomed to seeing within anarchist circles and given the nature of the writing it's hardly surprising that I gave up at around this point.

Quote:

This society holds as a principle that sexual consent on the part of a child is not valid, because he can't know what he really wants and needs. But his needs and wants are
considered valid when they concern his right to buy and enjoy. In the very same way as the customer is said to be always right, so the child is supposed to be. The child exists as a separate category which is a. sad caricature of the adult. A boy or girl of 5 is increasingly treated like the rest of us capitalized human beings: he or she is a consumer, and is given rights, which are of course imposed as much as guaranteed.

Quote:

A child's rights are absolute as he is held irresponsible of anything. When society, i.e. the State grants him its complete protection, it deprives him of any autonomy. He's given every right, except the right to know what he wants, in other words the right that would give some content to all the other rights.
There's no better definition of that modern invention, childhood. A child stops being a child as he enters the age when he can be sent to prison.

To be honest I'm not sure whether he is arguing against the child's entry into capitalist society or the repression of his sexuality that he encounters there.
I don't think this is a text in defence of paedophilia but I'm not convinced that it uses the example of the child in a very sensible or relevant way. In other texts he makes it clearer that the prohibition of child sexuality is harmful (which is a deeply banal statement for someone who wants to chuck Freud quotations into his texts) but I still don't think that the way the quoted paragraph above introduces child sexuality is at best muddled, I think he skirts the issue of Dutroux (who took children as well as young women) and I think using Gide as an example of someone who 'made love with young boys' as a counter-example is not a good choice (I have a limited knowledge of Gide's biography but it does not fit with this romantic ideal, whatever Gide's qualities as a writer )
On the whole I think the problem with this text is that it flirts with these ideas and uses them in what seems to me to eb aa bti of a cheap lunge for shock value. I pretty much agree with revol and jesuithitsquad on that.

I will not have time to get too much involved in the whole Dauve debate, I was going to translate a couple of the texts but the writing style makes it very difficult to do that quickly and effectviely.

Dec 26 2009 12:35

Felix Frost

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From another Dauve text on libcom:

Dauve wrote:

"For a World Without Moral Order" was written in 1983, during the backwash of the subversive wave of the sixties and seventies. Since then, things have only gotten worse. "Just try being openly pedophile," we wrote. Sadly prophetic. Any form of child-adult love is instantaneously identified as child abuse, whether in its least "offensive" forms or its most atrocious - rape and murder. Parental love would be the only exception to this rule, but, alas, let us not forget that statistics cruelly demonstrate that a child is most at risk of sexual molestation inside that bastion of security known as "the family." By the same logic, every heterosexual male ought to shake in his boots at the thought of Jack the Ripper, since this would be the ultimate result of all male-female attraction.

Dec 26 2009 20:32

Steven.

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again, I don't know if that is a defence necessarily, as in many countries at least a child is defined as being under 18. And in the UK at least the media does brand people as "paedophiles" for things like "consensual" sex with 15-year-olds - and don't get me wrong, this may well be completely wrong depending on the circumstances, but paedophilia is about attraction to prepubescent children, not ones who may appear physically as adults.

It would be good if he could just comment himself, because it can be difficult to tell exactly what someone means by their writing

Dec 26 2009 22:51

Farce

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How easy is he to get in touch with? As jesuithitsquad says, a libcom/Dauve interview would be good stuff.

Dec 27 2009 06:03

RedHughs

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Dauve is extremely easy to get in touch with by snail mail but is totally non-internet connected. Anyone doing an interview would have to be in France but he seemed pretty open to discussion and interviews back when I met him (2002).

Dec 27 2009 08:55

(Reply to #6) #9

revol68

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Steven. wrote:

again, I don't know if that is a defence necessarily, as in many countries at least a child is defined as being under 18. And in the UK at least the media does brand people as "paedophiles" for things like "consensual" sex with 15-year-olds - and don't get me wrong, this may well be completely wrong depending on the circumstances, but paedophilia is about attraction to prepubescent children, not ones who may appear physically as adults.
It would be good if he could just comment himself, because it can be difficult to tell exactly what someone means by their writing

LOL look at you trying desperately to cling to something, face it Dauve is a paedo apologist, Hakim Bey without the pervy poems or shit politics.

Like I said it really shouldn't be that much of surprise to anyone who has read his "For a World Without Moral Order".

Dec 27 2009 11:53

(Reply to #7) #10

jef costello

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Farce wrote:

How easy is he to get in touch with? As jesuithitsquad says, a libcom/Dauve interview would be good stuff.

Quint might be able to put you in touch with him.
If I move back to France I could go and interview him:)

Dec 27 2009 12:01

(Reply to #10) #11

guadia

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red is right, it is pretty easy to get in touch with him. just send him a letter via snail mail. (and really don´t rely on internet!) yes, quint can help you, but i don´t think that would be necessary, gilles is open guy.

Dec 27 2009 15:10

#12

jesuithitsquad

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So, for those that have met him or have corresponded, what is your take on this conversation?

Dec 27 2009 20:09

(Reply to #3) #13

Devrim

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kotob wrote:

Auschwitz - the big alibi
didn't find anything "negationist" there

Yes, what the text actually did was amalgamate two different things:

Not Bored wrote:

was around then that the son of Guy Dauve [born in 1947], taking on the pseudonym Jean Barrot to avoid identification by his father, became active in the ultra-Left. In a curious way, because it was essentially through his channels that the negationist writings of Paul Rassinier and texts that banalized genocide, such as "Auschwitz or the Great Alibi," would be promoted.

The text isn't accused of being 'negationist'. It is accused of 'banalizing genocide'.
It was an article original published in Programme Communiste in 1960 and probably written by Bordiga.

What it argues is that the holocaust was not an aberration or some specific product of Nazism, but some thing produced by capitalism. If anybody is responsible for 'banalising genocide' then it is, as the text argues, capitalism itself, in which genocide is a constant theme from the Ottoman Turks genocide against the Armenians to Rwanda.

Devrim

Dec 27 2009 19:56

#14

Judy

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Quote:

Quote:
It was around then that the son of Guy Dauve [born in 1947], taking on the pseudonym Jean Barrot to avoid identification by his father, became active in the ultra-Left. In a curious way, because it was essentially through his channels that the negationist writings of Paul Rassinier and texts that banalized genocide, such as "Auschwitz or the Great Alibi," would be promoted.

Sorry we confused trying to keep up with it, where this quote coming from Devrim?

Dec 27 2009 20:15

(Reply to #15) #15

Devrim

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Judy wrote:

Sorry we confused trying to keep up with it, where this quote coming from Devrim?

Sorry, my mistake, I have put a tag in now. It is a quote from the article, which was posted on here by BNB the other day, and was taken down. You can find it here: http://www.notbored.org/guy-dauve.html

Devrim

Dec 27 2009 20:27

#16

Judy

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Quote:

Sorry, my mistake, I have put a tag in now. It is a quote from the article, which was posted on here by BNB the other day, and was taken down. You can find it here: http://www.notbored.org/guy-dauve.html

OK Devrim thank you but I still confused maybe it my bad english, why article put down if OK for you quote it?

Dec 28 2009 07:13

#17

Devrim

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I think it was taken down because the admins here didn't want it on their site. It is their decision. I don't think there is a problem quoting it.

Devrim

Dauve

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