>On Sun, 2 May 2004, Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> >
> > Doug quoted Foucault:
> >
> > > "Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even
> > > though the thing one is fighting is abominable." - Foucault
> >
> > Does this mean that, given we can "imagine" people as "an appropriate
> > target for hatred and struggle," we can have fun killing them?
> >
> > Ted
>
>I think this is one of the crucial things to understand about F:
>"the thing one is fighting" is not a person or even a group of
>people. Rather, it is the social formation that makes certain
>types of people and groups. (This always stuck me as one of
>the more explicitly Marxist themes in Foucault's work.)
>
>Miles
I wasn't familiar with the quote, so I found more context:
In his preface to the U.S. edition of Anti-Oedipus (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), Michel Foucault calls the book an "Introduction to Non-Fascist Living". He refers not just to political fascism, but to the fascism that is within us, that causes us to desire our own domination: "This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:
Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which the Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into forms of repression) that possesses revolutionary force.
Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bound uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization. Do not become enamored of power." http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/staff/bertoldi/politik/deleuze.html