>>> 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.
>>
>> "In the case of popular justice ... you have the masses and their
>> enemies. Furthermore, the masses, when they perceive somebody to be
>> an
>> enemy, when they decide to punish this enemy - or to re-educate him -
>> do not rely on an abstract universal idea of justice, they rely on
>
> [snip]
>
> This passage is irrelevant to my post. Read Kel's recent post
> for the context of the original quote.
A passage in which Foucault advocates an idea of justice as "popular justice" elaborated as the "masses" "perceiving" "somebody" as an "enemy" whom they then proceed directly to "punish" or "re-educate" is relevant to your interpretive claim that, for Foucault,
> '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.
It contradicts it.
It's also relevant to interpreting the passage Kelley quoted. In particular, it represents "popular justice" as a way of connecting "desire to reality," which, for Foucault, is what enables "fighting" enemies to be an end in itself.
> 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.
The way "popular justice" connects unrepressed desire to reality is by associating justice with revenge unmediated by due process.
"The masses will discover a way of dealing with the problem of their enemies, of those who individually or collectively have harmed them, methods of retribution which will range from punishment to reeducation, without involving the form of the court which - in any case in our society, I don't know about China - is to be avoided." p. 28
Justice as "retribution" is a relatively unrepressed way of "enjoying the suffering of others."
Due process is also irrelevant because there is no objective truth - and hence no basis for a concept such as mass paranoia. There is only the subjective "truth" conditioned by "standpoint." Consequently, the only procedures the "masses" require before enacting revenge are those through which they establish a consensus that the individuals upon whom revenge is to be taken are "enemies." (Though, as I've pointed out before, the idea that there is a basis in experience for reaching consensus is inconsistent with the underpinning premise that experience is not direct experience of reality. The idea of such procedures is also inconsistent - as is the idea of justice as "retribution" itself - with fully unrepressed sadism.)
""I think ... that acts of justice by which the class enemy is repaid cannot be limited to a kind of thoughtless, instant spontaneity, unintegrated into an overall struggle. It is necessary to find forms through which this need for retribution, which is in fact real among the masses, can be developed, by discussion, by information .... In any case, the court, with its triple division into two disputing parties and the neutral institution, which comes to decisions on the basis of some concept of justice which exists in and for itself, seems to me a particularly disastrous model for the clarification and political development of popular justice." p. 29
"Now this idea that there can be people who are neutral in relation to the two parties, that they can make judgments about them on the basis of ideas of justice which have absolute validity, and that their decisions must be acted upon, I believe that all this is far removed from and quite foreign to the very idea of popular justice." p.8
The passages in which I take Zizek to be endorsing these ideas are those I've previously quoted (more than once) e.g. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040301/ 004828.html>.
I think myself that the movement away from literal jus talionis (which does seem to be implicitly treated by Foucault as a self-evidently true "abstract universal idea of justice") to, initially, "money" payments ("blood money," "wergeld") was progressive. It was so from the perspective of the idea of human "authenticity" I've attributed to Marx. (It's also relevant to understanding the psychology of "money.")
I also think, on the same ground, that the development of the idea of due process and the idea that a belief isn't necessarily true merely because it's my belief was progressive. These developments took us closer to rather than farther from the actualization of human "authenticity."
Ted