> On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Ted Winslow wrote:
>
>> Neitzsche and Foucault claim that radical skepticism including the
>> treatment of values as wholly subjective is the product of the working
>> of this "authenticity." They also claim (inconsistently as Heidegger
>> points out in the case of Nietzsche (pp. 213-4)) that this (radical
>> skepticism) frees us for guilt free enjoyment of this "authenticity" -
>> "the primordial pleasure to be found in causing pain."
>>
>> Ted
>
> I know you're probably just pulling my chain, but where do you get
> this stuff? Try actually reading Foucault or Nietzsche rather than
> relying on second-hand sources, and I suspect you'll stop posting goofy
> canards like the one above.
>
> From owner-marxism-international Wed Feb 5 11:00:44 1997
> Message-Id: <v01540b02af1e587f943b@[166.84.250.86]>
> Date: Wed, 5 Feb 1997 11:00:27 -0500
> From: dhenwood at panix.com (Doug Henwood)
> Subject: Re: M-I: Nietzsche and Mariategui (lnp post #1)
>
> At 9:53 PM 2/4/97, Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> >N has a lot of problems. He is a reactionary, a misogynist, an
> >antisocialist, an antidemocrat. But he's no racist and no Nazi.
>
> Gee, isn't that reassuring. But Justin, no one said he was a Nazi;
> we're
> talking influence and resemblance, and at least for me, a very strange
> choice of a hero for postmodernists. I know it's a lot easier to argue
> with
> strawpersons, but it's sort of a cheap trick.
>
> I've been reading James Miller's fascinating book, The Passion of
> Michel
> Foucault. In the chapter on Discipline and Punish, Miller draws out a
> lot
> of the Nietzschean influence on Foucault. What did F find of value in
> N?
>
> Well, first is that "knowledge is an 'invention' behind which lies
> something completely different from itself: a play of instincts,
> impulses,
> desires, fear, a will to appropriate." Knowledge is "always enslaved,
> dependent, and enthralled." For both F and N, "'knowledge' was a
> by-product
> of corporeal powers, and intimately intertwined with an attempt to
> regulate
> these powers; the atempt to regulate power was, for both, tied to the
> prohibition of violent, cruel, and aggressive impulses, a prohibition
> enforced through punishment; both men hypothesized that such violent,
> cruel, and aggressive impulses, once blocked from external discharge,
> rather than vanishing, were merely driven inward - explaining, 'no
> doubt,'
> as Foucault glossed this quintenssentially Nietzschean idea in
> Discipline
> and Punish, how 'the man of modern humanism was born' - and how the
> soul
> became a 'prison' of the body."
>
> Before modern humanism, civilization was imposed by brutal tortures,
> which
> Foucault himself called "glorious" ("l'eclat des supplices" in the
> original). Says Miller: "The word eclat here evokes a Nietzschean
> notion
> underlined throughout Discipline and Punish: torture, far from being
> the
> disgusting act of blind savagery modern humanists often assume it to
> be,
> was rather a carefully calibrated instrument of culture, a regulated
> practice with its own splendors and glory. An 'art of unbearable
> sensations,' a 'theater of hell,' 'the poetry of Dante put into laws,'
> the
> public ritual of death-by-torture offered an occasion for
> experiencing, if
> only vicariously, pleasures otherwise forbidden.... As Nietzsche
> explained
> in the Genealogy of Morals, the harshest penal practices paradoxically
> honored and preserved some of the human being's most elemental
> impulses:
> 'In punishment there is so much that is *festive*!' To 'see others
> suffer
> does one good.' .... 'To practice cruelty is to enjoy the highest
> gratification of the feeling of power,' Nietzsche had written in 1880."
>
> Miller, again: "This is the form of cruely proper to the philosopher.
> Driven by the will to know - a will nurtured and preserved by the
> practice
> of asceticism - thinkers finally appear who, recognizing that the idea
> of
> truth is itself a kind of fiction, spare nothing to tell those who will
> listen that everything we hold as solid and certain aboutt he world is,
> upon closer examination, demonstrably accidental, contingent, or false:
> laws, ideas, philosophies, religions, moralities, everything. Such
> honesty
> risks ending in nihilism.... There is in the Nietzschean will to know,
> as
> Foucault described it in 1971, 'something of the murderous,' something
> at
> odds with the 'happiness of mankind'; for this terrible will to know
> 'sweeps along with an ever more furious determination; instinctive
> violence
> accelerates in it and increases.' But the violence of the Dionysian
> philosopher is no longer driven inward; it is rather aimd outward,
> taking
> joy in destroying whatever mutilates life, and a malicoius delight in
> translating 'man back into nature' - an animal 'nature' characterized,
> among other things, by cruelty; the primordial pleasure to be found in
> inflicting, and suffering, pain."
>
> Now, on one level, this N-F hybrid is exhilarating in its energy and
> iconoclasm. But what is good aesthetics can be pretty awful politics.
> What's useful in this excerpt - the relation of ideologies to power and
> interest - is hardly foreign to the Marxian tradition. What seems
> unique to
> the spirit of this passage is the eroticization of violence, which -
> pardon
> my humanism - is frightening. And not unrelated to Naziism, either.
>
>
> Doug