> > Sultan's is also the insight of Foucault. This form of "science" to
> > some degree (Foucault himself exaggerates it) hides a sadistic will
> to
> > power. What Foucault fails to notice, though, is that the methods
> > themselves are inadequate for understanding their object because they
> > canalize the same instinct as the sadistic will to power. The
> methods
> > deny that the object is "alive."
>
> No, you're missing Foucault's point. He is not anti-psychiatry
> or anti-science, and it has nothing to do with sadism. F's most
> important insight is that modern power relations work by producing
> things, not denying them or censoring them. One example: we
> can better control mass populations by creating criminal deviant
> types (Discipline and punish). Scientific discourse facilitates
> this (criminology, etc). All this has nothing to do with
> "sadistic will to power".
I could be. I have, however, more than once pointed to and quoted relevant extracts from an essay by James Miller that offers textual evidence supporting this interpretive claim. I originally pointed to it in a discussion with you. Your reply, you may remember, was:
> > Miles Jackson wrote:
> >
> > > 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).
>
> I've always thought Fred's "will to power" was pretty dodgy. In any
> case,
> this illustrates my point: Nietzsche justifies cruelty and domination
> by
> making reference to an all powerful, universal life-force (will to
> power).
> Again, the evidence is clear: domination and mistreatment are justified
> and maintained by a belief in the inherent superiority of one
> moral/value
> system over another. The Inquisition, the Holocaust, genocides, Abu
> Ghraib, the list goes on--these are not the results of wanton moral
> relativism; they are the direct products of the ideology of moral
> hierarchies.
Here, as the passage I recently quoted shows, you're contradicting Nietzsche and Foucault as Miller interprets them.
> "Governed by the will to truth — a will nurtured and preserved by the
> practice of asceticism — the philosopher finally appears, who,
> recognizing that the idea of truth is itself a kind of fiction, spares
> nothing in telling us that everything we hold as solid and certain
> about the world is, on closer examination, demonstrably accidental,
> contingent, or false — laws, ideas, philosophies, religions,
> moralities, everything. Such honesty risks ending in nihilism — the
> catastrophic conviction that nothing is true and anything is
> permitted. Destroying, as it does, assumptions and essential
> convictions that enable societies to function and most people to feel
> at home in the world, the philosopher’s will to truth is “a kind of
> sublime wickedness.” But this final cruelty, unlike its Christian
> antecedent, does not incarcerate the will to power; rather, it
> promises to liberate this will from the shackles of groundless guilt,
> thereby restoring “its goal to the 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."
James Miller "Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty" in
_Political Theory_, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), 470-491.
According to Miller, the conception of the "will to truth" as expressing a sadistic "will to power" is a key aspect of Foucault's appropriation of Nietszche. I assume, given the certainty with which you contradict it, that you've read Miller's essay and can point to textual evidence refuting the claim. It's available on the web <http://phoenixandturtle.net/ excerptmillamiller%20foucault%20nietzsche%20cruelty.htm>
Miller isn't alone. Here's a passage from an lecture by Steven Connor available online at <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/skc/wartruth.htm>:
> The entanglement of truth in war and war in truth becomes all the more
> visible against the background of the more general claims regularly
> advanced nowadays for the mutual definition and contamination of truth
> by power and vice versa, claims which are nowhere more emphatically
> announced, of course, than in the work of Foucault. For Foucault, at
> least after the decisive Nietzschean turn which his work underwent
> from the late 1960s, the most urgent task for thought was to dismantle
> truth's endogenous account of itself as a gradual emergence into its
> own freedom and self-determination. By contrast, Foucault's
> genealogical method aimed to show the entanglement of truth with power
> at every point. Foucault sees the very division between true and false
> statements as the most important form of the ordering of discourse, as
> a kind of primal violence that is both enacted upon discourse and
> effected through its operations. The approving gloss that Foucault
> gives of Nietzsche's notion of the will-to-truth in his `Nietzsche,
> Genealogy, History' establishes the deep grain of shared assumption
> between the two writers:
>
> "The historical analysis of this rancorous will to knowledge reveals
> that all knowledge rests upon injustice (that there is no right, not
> even in the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for truth) and
> that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous,
> opposed to the happiness of mankind)." (Foucault 1977: 162)
>
> Foucault enlarges rhapsodically on Nietzsche's claims that the
> will-to-knowledge is to be construed, not as a progressive redemption
> of truth from slavery, war and violence, but as a force and a passion
> which exacts from its subjects a `progressive enslavement to its
> instinctive violence' (ibid). The desire for knowledge is for
> Nietzsche, in some sentences which Foucault quotes with some relish,
> both a Schopenhaurean principle of biological survival (`The desire
> for knowledge...fears nothing but its own extinction', writes
> Nietzsche) and the greatest threat to the survival of the human
> species, since `it may be that mankind may eventually perish from this
> passion for knowledge' (quoted, Foucault 1977: 163). This idea
> resurfaces in the latter portions of the first volume of Foucault's
> History of Sexuality, in which he calls attention to the murderous
> forms taken by the historically most recent form of the
> will-to-knowledge, the desire for knowledge over and mastery of the
> forms of life itself, `bio-truth' or `bio-power':
>
> "This formidable power of death...now presents itself as the
> counterpart of power that acts positively upon life, which undertakes
> to administer it, to increase it, to multiply it, to exert over it
> precise controls and general regulations. Wars are no longer waged in
> the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf
> of the existence of all; whole populations are incited to kill one
> another in the name of their need to live." (1979: 136-7)
>
Ted