> But here's the trap: the dominator always justifies domination by
> pointing out his superior morals/values/norms. So in fact domination
> is in fact imbricated with the notion that values can be hierarchically
> arranged in a nonrelativistic way. Sadistic domination is not
> (typically) a product of the "thorough going relativity of values".
This isn't true of Nietzsche's and Foucault's treatment of sadistic domination .
They treat it as the human end in itself (for abundant textual evidence demonstrating this, see James Miller's "Carnivals of Atrocities: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty" in _Political Theory_, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), 470-491).
"More fateful, because more fundamental, though, is Nietzsche's proposition - at first advanced hesitantly - that the infliction of pain, to the extent it excites pleasure, ought not to be regarded as evil. When suffering is 'accompanied by _pleasure_ (feeling of one's own power, of one's own strong excitation),' writes Nietzsche in _Human, All Too Human_, 'it occurs for the wellbeing of the individual.
Without pleasure no life; the struggle for pleasure is the struggle for life. Whether an individual pursues this struggle in such a way that people call him _good_, or in such a way that they call him _evil_, is determined by the degree and quality of his intellect.'
"This formulation, which yokes pleasure and pain together in a kind of Dionysian _folie à deux_, grows increasingly central to Nietzsche's thought. To exercise actively the will to power, he regards as the essence of life. To exercise this power with abandon is not only to court being cruel but, when cruelty occurs, to _enjoy_ the pain, the suffering, the agony that cruelty causes. 'To practice cruelty is to enjoy the highest' - note the adjective: _the highest_ - 'gratification of the feeling of power.' To _enjoy_ the exercise of power is, in effect, to _be_ cruel: This is Nietzsche's hard teaching." (Miller, p. 475)
Nietzsche treats the antihumanist "materialism" Marx criticizes in the third thesis on Feuerbach as the "paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty". The "thorough going relativity of values and ideals" derived from this ontology liberates the "will to power" "from the shackles of groundless guilt, thereby restoring 'its goal to earth' by translating 'man back into nature' - an animal 'nature' characterized, among other things, by cruelty, the primordial pleasure to be found in causing pain." (Miller, p. 477)
Ted