{2} Continuing along with Slavoj Žižek on ontological violence.

So when, in his reading of the famous chorus from Antigone on the "uncanny/demonic" character of man in the Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger deploys the notion of "ontological" violence that pertains to every founding gesture of the new communal world of a people, accomplished by poets, thinkers, and statesmen, one should always bear in mind that this "uncanny/demonic" dimension is ultimately that of language itself:

Violence is usually seen in terms of the domain in which concurring compromise and mutual assistance set the standard for Dasein, and accordingly all violence is necessarily deemed only a disturbance and an offence...The violent one, the creative one who sets forth into the unsaid, who breaks into the unthought, who compels what has never happened and makes appear what is unseen--this violent one stands at all times in daring...Therefore the violence-doer knows no kindness and conciliation (in the ordinary sense), no appeasement and mollification by success or prestige and by their confirmation...For such a one, disaster is the deepest and broadest Yes to the Overwhelming...Essential de-cision, when it is carried out and when it resists the constantly pressing ensnarement in the everyday and the customary, has to use violence. This act of violence, this de-cided setting out upon the way to the Being of beings, moves humanity out of the hominess of what is most directly nearby and what is usual.[Pp. 160, 172, 174, again, & 179]

As such, the Creator is, hupsipolis apolis (Antigone, line 370): he stands outside and above polis and its ethos; he is unbounded by any rules of "morality" (which are only a degenerative form of ethos); only as such can he ground a new form of ethos, of communal being in a polis...Of course, what reverberates here is the topic of an "illegal" violence that founds the rule of the law itself. Heidegger hastens to add how the first victim of this violence is the Creator himself, who has to be erased with the advent of the new order that he grounded. This erasure can take different forms. The first is physical destruction--from Moses and Julius Caesar onwards, we know that a founding figure has to be killed. But there is also the relapse into madness, as in the case of great poets, from Hölderlin to Ezra Pound, who were blinded by the very force of their poetic vision. Interestingly, the point in Antigone where the chorus bewails man as the most "demonic" of all creatures, as a being of excess, a being who violates all proper measures, comes immediately after it is revealed that someone has defied Creon's order and performed the funeral ritual on Polyneices body. It is this act which is perceived as a "demonic" excessive act, not Creon's prohibition. Antigone is far from being the [;ace-holder of moderation, of respect for proper limits, against Creon's sacrilegious hubris; quite the contrary, the true violence is hers.

Pp. 68-70

There are minor differences between the excerpts from Introduction to Metaphysics above and the translation by Polt and Fried referenced in Violence. After pointing out a couple paragraphs earlier the verbal ("essencing") element of Wesen, as different from the metaphysical static understanding of essence, I was surprised to find that Zizek changed "essential de-ciding" to "essential de-cision".

Continued.  ¶ 12:25 PM