Travis ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 9:39 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Re: Queer Theory, was Re: Sex, Kink and Ick
>T Fast wrote:
>
>> I think Foucault fits nicely alongside Marx rather than in opposition.
>> Anyway that is my first cut at the problem you have posed.
>
> Some time ago I pointed to an essay by James Miller tracing out the links
> between Foucault and Nietzsche, particularly as these are found in
> Discipline and Punish. Here are some extracts indicating the central
> thesis.
>
>> "As we have seen, Foucault, at the outset of Surveiller et punir,
>> declares his ambition to write, as Nietzsche did, a “genealogy” — a
>> “genealogy of the modern ‘soul.’”11 Interpreting the eagle and sun as
>> Nietzschean symbols suggests, more narrowly, that we read Surveiller et
>> punir as a genealogy of a special type of modem soul, namely “the last
>> man”— docile, oblivious, a stranger to creative energy, unable to take
>> flight, unwilling to be different, serenely unaware of those
>> “hair-raising and hazardous things” that have driven other men “into a
>> madhouse.” In effect, Surveiller et punir would then become a sequel not
>> only to Foucault’s own exploration of the madhouse in Folie et déraison
>> but to Nietzsche’s original Genealogy of Morals — a sequel in which the
>> French genealogist shows how the modern human sciences have taken over
>> the role of Christianity in disciplining the body and constituting the
>> soul, substituting for the Christian soul, “born in sin and subject to
>> punishment,” a modern soul, born under surveillance and subject to an
>> indefinite discipline, “an interrogation without limits.” “If I wanted
>> to be pretentious,” Foucault remarked in an interview shortly after the
>> publication of Surveiller et punir, “I would use ‘the genealogy of morals’
>> as the general title of what I am doing.”
>> "Now, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals expresses the same disquieting
>> transvaluation that I have already noted in Surveiller et punir.
>> Nietzsche, too, expresses skepticism about the value of eliminating pain;
>> he also expresses an unwonted, disturbing sympathy for institutions that
>> promote public displays of cruelty.
>> "Nietzsche, furthermore, explicitly places the phenomenon of cruelty at
>> the heart of his genealogy. By cruelty, I mean (to modify slightly the
>> definition in the Oxford English Dictionary) “a disposition to inflict
>> suffering”; indifference to or delight in pain or misery; mercilessness,
>> hardheartedness, especially as exhibited in action. “Man is the cruelest
>> animal,” writes Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Whatever is most
>> evil is his best power and the hardest stone for the highest creation.”
>>
>> "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 it 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."
>>
>> "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.
>
> Ted
>
>
>
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